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FEATURES the enemy of unity. On the contrary, he concludes that the exclusion of minority languages can engender disunity, whether through loss of identity or through fostering elitism and mismatches in development. Crowd-sourcing KEEPING FAITH Members of the church community where Jill carried out her studies broadly ethnic lines; and the publication in 2000 of the whole Bible in Kiriol (Portuguese Creole), the country's lingua franca. In the aftermath of the civil war, Kiriol was seen as a vehicle of national unity and healing. At the same time, the new Bible in Kiriol made it appear feasible to drop the rendering of scripture into the mother-tongues, on the basis that 'everyone understands something of the Bible in Kiriol'. However, in practice, it meant that many people no longer heard scripture in a language they understood well. Though this is not an official church policy, it is becoming embedded in church culture. Last year, my MA students in Guinea-Bissau administered a survey among around 100 pastors attending their national assembly. They found that a small minority believed that people needed to hear the word of the Lord in the language that spoke most to the heart, which, in rural areas at least, would generally be their mother-tongue. The overwhelming majority considered it better to avoid the use of mother-tongues for the sake of ethnic unity. This 'zero option' is something that needs to be taken into consideration in constructing a sociology of interpreting. In the field of community development, Djaló points out that a tendency to use Kiriol consolidates power in the hands of an urban Kiriol-speaking elite, at the expense of the rural populations.3 The same effect can be observed in the churches. Djaló considers it to be an error to identify the use of a single language with the ideal of national unity, and plurilingualism as Vol/52 No/5 2013 When the interpreting of Sunday services was dropped in the town church of the GuineaBissau group, the senior pastor introduced a practice of occasionally asking the congregation an open question as to how they would translate a Kiriol theological key term into the various mother-tongues represented – a kind of 'crowd-sourcing' of translation solutions. Whenever he does this, the congregation becomes very animated; people turn around to discuss the term with the row behind or even call across to the other side of the church. After a few minutes of free discussion, the pastor asks a presbyter of each language group to give a summing-up, as a kind of moderator. Kiriol uses Portuguese loan words for most of the key biblical concepts, but this practice goes some way to meet the need for them to be re-conceptualised in a vernacular frame. Written scriptures A Bible translation team has been working for some years on production of a print Bible in Manjaku. A pastor reviewing the translated Luke's Gospel commented that using it was like when you wanted to share a mango and someone had already peeled it and sliced it. However, he spoke the dialect in which the translation had been carried out, and had learned to read it aloud without difficulty. It is a different thing when it is not in your dialect. Do you adapt the morphology and syntax to your own dialect, or do you try to read it aloud imitating the accent of the dialect in Religious settings serve a useful function in identifying gifted young interpreters which it was written, which can cause offence? Or do you read aloud the words as they are written, but with your own accent? People fell about laughing when that was tried. It remains to be seen which group is more likely to take up the written use of scripture. Experience so far suggests that written scripture texts will not find easy acceptance in the Gambian group unless they are well formulated to match the interpreters' lively delivery of scripture. And in the face of the zero option of not delivering the scriptures in the mother-tongues in Guinea-Bissau, will the availability of written scriptures bring about a paradigm shift in attitude? Notes 1 Bandia, P, 1998, 'African Tradition' in Baker, M (ed), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 295-304 2 Wilss, W, 1996, Knowledge and Skills in Translator Behavior, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Benjamins 3 Djaló, I, 1989, 'Contribuição para uma reflexão: Educação, multilinguismo, e unidade nacional' in A Construção da Nação em África, Bissau, INEP BIBLE TRANSLATION Manjaku pastors review key terminology (bottom left); and members of the congregation (below) OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 19