Translation Project Will Serve the Hmong Around the World
MINNEAPOLIS — It's a story that loses a lot in translation: Holy Apostles Episcopal Church in St. Paul, Minn., is working on a Hmong version of the Book of Common Prayer. This simple-sounding endeavor goes far beyond just replacing one word with another.
It's a story about a church that was in danger of dying joining forces with a culture that was worried about the same thing. It's a story about finding just the right words in a language that didn't even exist in written form until the 1950s. It's a story about a book from a St. Paul neighborhood that will spread around the world.
Five years in the making, the first Hmong translation of the most important book in the Episcopalian service might be completed by fall.
"That's our dream, anyway," said the Rev. William Bulson, the man overseeing the project. "It's really time-consuming work."
A lot of people are waiting for it. The Twin Cities is home to the country's largest Hmong community who fled the Communist takeover of Laos in 1975.
Of the 90,000 Hmong in the Twin Cities, 10,600 are Christian, according to the Rev. John Mayer, executive director of City Vision, a Minneapolis organization that tracks religious demographics.
In Laos, the Hmong had their own religion, which was a form of pantheism, the belief that the spirit of God is in all things. Christian missionaries started arriving in the 1950s, but most of the conversions have come as a result of Christian churches sponsoring the refugees.
None of the Episcopalian Hmong will have a book in their native language until the Holy Apostles project is done, including those who went to Canada, Australia, France and French Guinea.
"We're the only ones working on this in the entire, worldwide Anglican Church," said the Rev. Letha Wilson-Barnard, the vicar at Holy Apostles.
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
Holy Apostles had watched its average Sunday morning attendance fall to about 60 people, most of them at or near retirement age. In 2004, it was placed on death-watch by the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota.
Bulson, the vicar at the time, decided to reach out to the Hmong community, a handful of whom were already attending services. A key to recruiting would be to provide at least part of the service in their language.
A linguistics major before he entered the seminary, Bulson set to work translating a prayer. As soon as he introduced it into the service, two things became evident: He was onto something, and it was going to involve a tremendous amount of work.
Five years later, Holy Apostles is drawing 160 people to Sunday services that are in a blend of English and Hmong, and Bulson is still hard at work at the translation. The project accelerated when it qualified for a grant that enabled him to give up full-time ministry to concentrate on it. (He still works half-time as a priest.)
MORE THAN A BOOK
The Book of Common Prayer guides everything in the Episcopal Church, from baptisms to burials. But the significance of the translation goes well beyond the rituals it contains, said Bao Moua, a member of the church who is on the translation team.
"It's a way to keep our language alive," said Moua, 29, who like many of her generation grew up speaking only Hmong at home. "Most younger kids can speak Hmong, because their parents and grandparents speak it, but they can't read and write it."
For centuries, it existed only as an oral language. A written version wasn't created until Western missionaries reached Laos in the early 1950s. Many older members of the Hmong community didn't put a high priority on reading and writing because they had grown up without it.
But as each generation becomes increasingly Americanized, elders have realized that their native tongue has little chance of surviving if it's not in writing. In that vein, the translation is formatted in a way that serves as a Hmong-English tutorial, with the English text on one page and the Hmong version on the facing page.
"That way, people can go back and forth and follow along," Moua said.
The project also blends her parents' Hmong culture with her American one. In Laos, the oldest males were in charge of preserving and teaching the language.
"Just the fact that a woman is doing this is very unusual," she said.
WORDS NOT ALWAYS A MATCH
Early in the translation effort, Bulson realized that it was not going to be a simple word-for-word conversion.
"They don't have the same words that we have," he said.
Take "peace" for example. "That word doesn't exist in Hmong," Bulson said. "They have separate words depending on the type of peace you're talking about: inner peace, political peace, the cessation of hostilities, the reconciliation of opposing views and so on.
"A seemingly simple phrase like, 'The peace of the Lord be with you,' turns into a major debate. We end up having to go back to the original texts, some of which are in Hebrew, to try to decipher exactly what the person writing that meant."
Then there's the problem of converting written Hmong to speech.
"The language has eight different tones," said Wilson-Barnard, who had no exposure to Hmong before she replaced Bulson as vicar. "It can throw you when you look at it. It's not unusual to have five consonants in a row, and our eyes have trouble connecting to that."
Length is yet another issue. "One word in English often ends up being three words in Hmong," Moua said. That's a particular problem for her because she's also translating hymns. "It's very difficult to maintain the phrasing with the beat."
She concedes that the work can be frustrating.
"I originally volunteered because I wanted my parents to be able to follow the service," she said. "Many times since then I've asked myself, 'Why am I doing this?' I'm swamped with other things I could be doing.
"But on Sunday morning, when I hear the prayers and the hymns, then I know why God called me to do this. We need to finish this book. There are a lot of people out there looking to us."
This story was originally published June 9, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Translation Project Will Serve the Hmong Around the World."