Islands Business - Profile: FROM SCIENCE TO BIBLE TRANSLATION

Zobule translates Good News into local lingo

Dionisia Tabureguci
It is often said that man may make his plans but God has the last word. For Alpheaus Zobule, bearer of God’s Word to his Luqa-speaking people in the Solomon Islands, that was exactly what happened.

Dr Alpheaus Zobule (left)... consults with another translator.

His ambition and initial path of education led him to the fields of science and engineering. The Lord took him to Texas.

“I went to Dallas Theological Seminary, in Texas, to do a master’s degree in Biblical Studies and Linguistics (1994-1996), spending time also at Jerusalem University College (Israel) as well as Hebrew University (Israel) to learn more about the Hebrew language as well as the bible land,” said Zobule from his home in Honiara.

“After translating the New Testament into my language, I did another master’s degree at Trinity Theological College in Singapore and then went to the USA to do a PhD in Biblical Studies which I have just recently completed.”

Zobule, who has a Doctor of Philosophy from the Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School in the United States, is now the first Pacific islander to be a translation consultant for United Bible Societies, an organisation involved in the translation and distribution of bibles worldwide, and which has its Pacific head-office in Fiji.

Some time back, Dr Zobule had made an outstanding contribution to the work of Christianity in the region.

He translated the New Testament portion of the bible into his mother tongue Luqa (pron: Lungga), becoming the first person ever to do that and to put the orally spoken language into a written form. His feat received national attention in the US and a story about his work featured in the Washington Post.

When we spoke with Zobule, he was back home in Solomon Islands working on several translation projects for United Bible Societies.

“I am from a small island of Ranongga in the Western Province in the Solomon Islands,” the soft-spoken man of God explained.

“In the last century, the Methodist missionaries were active in that part of the country and the predominant church in the area is United Church, a church that has its roots in Wesleyan Methodism. I grew up in a tiny village where the idea of going to school was very remote in the minds of the villagers. There was no school around, and nobody seemed to know, much less cared, about sending their children to school.

“My parents, however, thought that education was such a good thing, so they decided to send my sisters and me to school. That meant they had to send us to villages far away where we would be away for four to five months at a time, attending school. As long as I can remember, my father would give me this daily sermon, encouragement, advice: ‘My son, go to school.’

“I was tired of hearing those words, but my father was never tired of saying them. Those words made an impact in my thinking.”

His father’s wisdom paid off. Zobule graduated to high school, moving on to Goldie College and King George VI School in Honiara and then to Fiji to attend the University of the South Pacific, where he studied science in 1987 and 1988.

“I must have done well enough to merit a scholarship, and so the US Embassy in Fiji offered me a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the US. I accepted it and so I went to the University of Kansas, USA (1988-1991) and graduated with a Bachelor of Science and Mechanical Engineering. I returned to the Solomon Islands in 1991 and after spending 1993 and part of 1994 as a Maths lecturer at the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education, I decided it was time to focus my time studying linguistics and biblical studies and to devote my time to translating the bible into my own language.”

That change of career was a defining moment and the deeper Zobule delved into his bible studies, the more he found himself drawn to translation work.

“Doing bible studies was something I wanted to do for personal benefit because that was where my interest lay.

"The idea of getting involved in translation work came later on,” said Zobule. So he set about studying the ‘bible languages’, or the languages in which manuscripts that contributed to today’s English Bible as we know it, were written in.

These included Greek (New Testament), Hebrew and Aramaic (Old Testament). A couple of ancient languages like Syriac also had to be learnt in order for one to delve into the depths of those ancient scrolls. In his first year at bible studies, Zobule began translating the New Testament from its source language (Greek) into his Luqa language and naturally, this work progressed to form the basis of his thesis.

But that was not an easy task. “Translating is a very difficult work,” explained Zobule. “Translating from a source language (Greek for NT, Hebrew and Aramaic for OT) into a target language (like Luqa) is always a challenge."