The concept that is expressed as “mind” in English is translated as “head-heart” in Yatzachi Zapotec. This concept is applied to terms that are translated in English as “fellowship” (“head-hearts are one”), the “inner-self” (“have no evil” is “have no evil in our head-hearts”), “eye” (in the sense of “understanding”), “heart” and “soul.”
Source: John Beekman in Notes on Translation November 1964, p. 1-22.
Nida (1952, p. 125ff.) reports on different translation of the Greek and Hebrew terms that are translated as “love” when referring to loving God:
“The Toro So Dogon people on the edge of the Sahara in French West Africa speak of ‘love for God’ as ‘to put God in our hearts.’ This does not mean that God can be contained wholly within the heart of a man, but the Eternal does live within the hearts of men by His Holy Spirit, and it is only love which prompts the soul to ‘put God in the heart.’
“The Mitla Zapotec Indians, nestled in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, describe ‘love’ in almost opposite words. Instead of putting God into one’s own heart, they say, ‘my heart goes away with God.’ Both the Toro So Dogon and the Zapotecs are right. There is a sense in which God dwells within us, and there is also a sense in which our hearts are no longer our own. They belong to Him, and the object of affection is not here on earth, but as pilgrims with no certain abiding place we long for that fuller fellowship of heaven itself.
“The Uduks seem to take a rather superficial view of love, for they speak of it as ‘good to the eye.’ But we must not judge spiritual insight or capacity purely on the basis of idioms. Furthermore, there is a sense in which this idiom is quite correct. In fact the Greek term agapé, which is used primarily with the meaning of love of God and of the Christian community, means essentially ‘to appreciate the worth and value of something.’ It is not primarily the love which arises from association and comradeship (this is philé), but it defines that aspect of love which prompted God to love us when there was no essential worth or value in us, except as we could be remade in the image of His Son. Furthermore, it is the love which must prompt us to see in men and women, still unclaimed for Jesus Christ, that which God can do by the working of His Spirit. This is the love which rises higher than personal interests and goes deeper than sentimental attachment. This is the basis of the communion of the saints.
“Love may sometimes be described in strong, powerful terms. The Miskitos of the swampy coasts of eastern Nicaragua and Honduras say that ‘love’ is ‘pain of the heart.’ There are joys which become so intense that they seem to hurt, and there is love which so dominates the soul that its closest emotion seems to be pain. The Tzotzils, living in the cloud-swept mountains of Chiapas in southern Mexico, describe love in almost the same way as the Miskitos. They say it is ‘to hurt in the heart.’ (…)
“The Q’anjob’al Indians of northern Guatemala have gone even a step further. They describe love as ‘my soul dies.’ Love is such that, without experiencing the joy of union with the object of our love, there is a real sense in which ‘the soul dies.’ A man who loves God according to the Conob idiom would say ‘my soul dies for God.’ This not only describes the powerful emotion felt by the one who loves, but it should imply a related truth—namely, that in true love there is no room for self. The man who loves God must die to self. True love is of all emotions the most unselfish, for it does not look out for self but for others. False love seeks to possess; true love seeks to be possessed. False love leads to cancerous jealousy; true love leads to a life-giving ministry.” (Source: Nida 1952)
In Mairasi, the term that is used for love for God, by God and for people is the same: “desire one’s face.” (source: Enggavoter 2004)
In Ogea the word for “love” is “die for someone.” (Source: Sandi Colburn in Holzhausen 1991, p. 22)
Translator Lee Bramlett submitted this on the translation of the Greek word that is translated into English as “love” (referring to God’s love). This letter was then reposted by Wycliffe Bible Translators (see here ):
“Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people? What clue had He planted to let the Hdi know who He was and how He wanted to relate to them?
“Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for ‘love.’ Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?
“Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, ‘Could you ‘ɗvi’ your wife?’ ‘Yes,’ they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.
“‘Could you ‘ɗva’ your wife?’ ‘Yes,’ they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.
“‘Could you ‘ɗvu’ your wife?’ Everyone laughed. ‘Of course not! If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘ɗvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.’
“Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, ‘Could God ‘ɗvu’ people?’
“There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. ‘Do you know what this would mean? This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.’
“One simple vowel and the meaning was changed from ‘I love you based on what you do and who you are,’ to ‘I love you, based on Who I am. I love you because of Me and NOT because of you.’
“God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. For centuries, the little word was there — unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.
“The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and 29,000 speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25: ‘Husbands, ‘ɗvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘ɗvu’-d the church…'”
In Hawai’i Creole English the love that God has is often translated as love an aloha. Aloha has a variety of meanings, including “hello,” “goodbye,” “love,” “thank you,” etc.
The Philippine languages of Cebuano, Tagalog, and Pampanga use a word (gugma, pag-ibig, and lugud respectively) that is also used for a “noble, refined love of people for each other,” distinct from romantic love. (Source: G. Henry Waterman in The Bible Translator 1960, p. 24ff. )
In Mairasi, the term that is used for love by God, for God and for people is the same: “desire one’s face.” (source: Enggavoter 2004)
The Greek that is translated with the capitalized “Father” in English when referring to God is translated in Highland Totonac with the regular word for (biological) father to which a suffix is added to indicate respect. The same also is used for “Lord” when referring to Jesus. (Source: Hermann Aschmann in The Bible Translator 1950, p. 171ff. )
The Hebrew and Greek that is translated as “world” in English is translated in Mandarin Chinese with shìjiè (世界). While shìjiè is now the commonly used term for “world” in Chinese, it was popularized as such by Chinese Bible translations. (Source: Mak 2017, p. 241ff.)
Following are a number of back-translations of 1 John 2:15:
Uma: “Let’s not love this world, or any of its contents. Whoever loves this world, they don’t love God the Father.” (Source: Uma Back Translation)
Yakan: “Don’t feel-good/like-to-do doing the things most people in this world do and don’t feel-good-about/like the various things in this world. Whoever feels-good-about/likes these things, he does not love his Father God.” (Source: Yakan Back Translation)
Western Bukidnon Manobo: “It is necessary that the activities of the people here on the earth who are the enemies of God are not big in our (incl.) breath; it is also necessary that there is nothing here on the earth which is big in our breath. For if there is a person and what is big in his breath are those things, it is not possible that what is dear in his breath is our Father God.” (Source: Western Bukidnon Manobo Back Translation)
Kankanaey: “You shouldn’t love the behavior which is opposed to what God wants and that which is on this earth, because if you love these-things, you also have no love for God our Father.” (Source: Kankanaey Back Translation)
Tagbanwa: “I urge you, no longer give preference to the ways of here under the heavens which are opposed to the will of God, or whatever here which is opposed to him. Because whoever still chooses-to-remain-committed-to these, it’s clear that he has no holding dear for this Father of ours.” (Source: Tagbanwa Back Translation)
Tenango Otomi: “Do not like the evil there is here in the world. He who likes the evil here in the world is the person who does not know how to love our Father.” (Source: Tenango Otomi Back Translation)
Yatzachi Zapotec: “Do not you desire intensely to do like the evil head-hearted people do, and likewise do not you desire intensely the things you will have in this world. We know if we are desiring intensely to do like the evil head-hearted people are doing, we have not yet come to love our father God.”
Eastern Highland Otomi: “Don’t like the world, neither the deeds of the world. If someone likes (loves) the world, he doesn’t esteem God.”
Tzotzil: “Don’t let it be that your hearts get taken up with what belongs to the world and what is here in the world. Because if our hearts are taken up with what belongs to the world, we don’t love our Father God.”
Garifuna: “Don’t you love the world’s character/conduct, nor any of the things which are in the world. If a person loves that which pertains to the world, he does not love (our) Father.” (Source for this and three above: John Beekman in Notes on Translation 12, November 1964, p. 1ff.)
The interpretation of verses 15-17 hinges on the right understanding of the term the world and its connotations, for which see below.
Do not love the world: the verb is used here with a nonpersonal goal in the sense of “to strive after,” “to try to get” (as in “love the reserved seats in the synagogues,” Luke 11.43, Good News Bible); then “to prefer,” in the sense of “to like better than the things of God” (as in “men love the darkness rather than the light,” John 3.19, Good News Bible). Therefore one often must use another rendering than the one in verse 10; for example, ‘to let the heart be taken up with,’ ‘to desire (literally to have a bursting heart)’; or ‘to covet,’ literally ‘to become small of heart’ (whereas in verse 10 the language concerned has ‘he who feels hurt in his heart for his brother’).
† The term the world occurs frequently in the New Testament in general and in the Johannine writings in particular (103 occurrences out of a total of 183). It is used with various shades of meaning, five of which are the following:
(1) In what may be called its central meaning, the world refers to the (orderly) universe, the system of the physical creation; see, for example, Acts 17.24. (2) Taken in a more restricted, locative sense, the word means “the earth” as the habitation of mankind and the place of man’s organization of creation. It is the place where God is at work, sending his Son (1 John 4.9), and where men should serve God (4.17), but where evil forces may be at work too (4.1, 3; 2 John 7). (3) In several cases the world is used with a personal reference, meaning mankind as a whole, as in 1 John 2.2; 4.14; compare also John 3.16. (4) Used metaphorically the word refers to man’s organization of creation, or to his way of life with its possessions, joys, desires, cares, and sufferings (3.17).
In these four occurrences the term can be said to be essentially neutral in connotation. But the world can occur also (5) with a negative connotation, standing for all who are enemies, or for all that is an enemy, of God and the believers (see 2.15-17; 3.1, 13; 4.4-5, 19). Taken thus it refers to the world and the persons in it as an evil system, as a way of life that is in the power of the evil one and therefore is friendly to the false teachers. Then the opposition between world and “God” is parallel to that between “darkness” and “light”; compare 1.5.
In practical usage the various meanings mentioned are, of course, not so neatly divided as is done here, for there is a certain inner unity among them. Where one of them is predominant, one or more of the other meanings may also be present, though only on a secondary level. Translators therefore have here an especially delicate task. On the one hand they must find a rendering that brings out, or at least does not obscure, the specific shade of meaning relevant in the context. On the other hand they should try to preserve the inner unity of the term, or at least not to differentiate more than is required by idiom.
In order to reach this end, it is sometimes possible to use one term, qualifying it according to context. One may have, for example, ‘the earth’ for meaning (2) and, metaphorically used, for meaning (4); ‘those who are in the earth’ for (3); ‘the evil earth,’ or ‘the evil persons in (or things in, or way of life on) the earth’ for (5). Another way to the same end, less explicit than the one just mentioned, is to say for meaning (5) ‘this (here) earth’ (tacitly implying a contrast to another and better one). In some languages it is the derived adjective that has the unfavorable connotation rather than the noun; for example, English “worldly”; the same is true of some Indonesian languages.
To preserve the inner unity of the term in this way is not always possible, however. In some receptor languages, for instance, one simply must use distinctive terms for meaning (2) and meaning (4). In another there exists no word for “world,” “earth,” or even for a wide stretch of land. Therefore world in the sense of “mankind,” meaning (3), had to be rendered as ‘people from everywhere.’
The things in the world, can be rendered as ‘whatever is in the world,’ ‘whatever the world offers,’ ‘things of men’ (a common expression in the language concerned for ‘pagan way of life’); or, making explicit the negative connotation, ‘doing like bad people do.’
The second sentence of the verse states that love for the world and love for God cannot go together (compare “a man cannot love the Father and love the world at the same time,” Phillips). Thus it expresses the first reason for the exhortation not to love the world, the second reason for which is given in verse 17. Compare for a similar statement James 4.4, “to be the world’s friend means to be God’s enemy” (Good News Bible).
Love for the Father is not in him: for the construction love for the Father, more literally “love of the Father,” see “love for God” in 2.5. Taken thus the clause is another way of saying ‘he cannot love the Father.’
The other interpretation of the construction, in which the Father is the agent of the process, is not to be wholly excluded, however. It is followed, for example, in “the Father’s love is not in him” (Translators’ Translation, footnote) and “he is a stranger to the Father’s love” (New English Bible), or, shifting to a verb, ‘he cannot love as the Father loves.’ Some translators feel that both meanings of the construction are probably intended. Therefore they prefer a reciprocal interpretation; for example, ‘there can be no love between (God) the Father and men’ (compare Bijbel in Gewone Taal). In support of this interpretation one may quote “we love because God first loved us” (4.19, Good News Bible).
Quoted with permission from Haas, C., de Jonge, M. and Swellengrebel, J.L. A Handbook on The First Letter of John. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1972. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .
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