Native speaker intuition, orthography, and discourse

Bible translation is increasingly being done primarily by mother-tongue speakers. These speakers possess several advantages over non-native translators, including bringing innate knowledge of their language into the translation process. Whereas conscious knowledge obviously contributes directly to the translation task, the intuition that speakers unconsciously have can equally contribute to translation, and this can be raised to awareness through a directed investigative process. Various consultants have shown by numerous clear and striking examples in diverse languages that spontaneous intuition alone is often not enough for accurate and natural translation. However, participatory methodology, as a collaborative partnership between native speaker and outsider, can help draw out speakers’ subconscious knowledge. When translators discover the patterns of their language for themselves through guided investigation, their awareness results in improved writing and translation, in areas such as word breaks, tone representation, and natural ways of constructing not only individual sentences, but also paragraphs and entire stories and other genres of Scripture. Diverse participatory methods have successfully served numerous language communities over many years. They are proposed as the ideal way for mother-tongue speakers to become aware of the structures of their language, which greatly contributes to translation quality, so that people will read, understand, and use Scripture, resulting in transformed lives.