Parts of Bible Are Translated for Aborigines

It took John Sandefur 12 years to cross the cultural gulf between his native Louisiana and the wilds of northern Australia before he could translate the Bible into the “Holi Baibul.”

Sandefur, a Christian missionary, has just finished translating portions of the Bible into the Kriol Language of the Australian aborigines with whom he lives and works at Roper River in the outback, some 2,500 miles from Sydney.

After many years of study and work, Sandefur and his helpers translated about 8% of the Bible into Kriol, including the Gospels and parts of Genesis and Revelations.

Sandefur, a native of Natchitoches, La., has been in the remote Cape York region for almost 13 years.

After missionary and linguistics training in the United States, Sandefur came to Australia to work among the aborigines.

Australia’s aborigines speak dozens of languages and dialects. The Kriol spoken by the people in the Cape York area is a dialect native to some 20,000 aborigines, the most widely spoken aboriginal tongue.

While parts of the Bible have been translated into native dialects, there had been no attempt to translate it into Kriol.

Sandefur’s translation problems began with contentions by some whites that Kriol was not suitable because it was a pidgin language, or a combination of English and native dialects.

“One of the biggest problems has been overcoming social prejudice from people who said it wasn’t fit to project biblical concepts and ideas,” Sandefur said.

Some aborigines also objected to the use of Kriol on the grounds that it was not a pure language and denigrated their traditional culture.

But Sandefur and his Australian wife, Joy, persisted with Kriol because it was the most widely spoken dialect and they believed it had evolved beyond pidgin into a native language.

Sandefur worked with ancient Greek texts and two aboriginal translators to explicate the Bible without using English, so the ideas could be translated directly into Kriol without distortion.

The translation makes the Bible far more comprehensible to the aborigines, who now see many parallels between their life styles and traditions and the Bible, Sandefur said.