Robert Moffat and the Long Work of Translation

In the nineteenth century there lived a gardener's son from Scotland who would give half his life to a single, patient task: putting the Bible into a language not his own. His name was Robert Moffat, and he sailed for southern Africa under the London Missionary Society as a young man, with rough hands and little learning. He would not leave for the best part of fifty years. He is remembered as a pioneer of mission in that land, and as the father-in-law of David Livingstone. But his deepest work was quieter than any expedition. It was the slow, daily labour of language.

Consider what that labour actually meant. Moffat settled among Tswana-speaking communities, in a living world that was already full. Full of trade and travel, of cattle and councils, of chiefs and conflict and centuries of memory. He had not arrived at an empty field. He had arrived among a people, and to reach them he had to learn to speak as they spoke. So he listened. He listened for years. He sat with speakers of Setswana and let their tongue correct his own, again and again, the way a stream wears at stone.

There were no shortcuts. The language had no settled written form, so he had to find one, sound by sound. He gathered words. He lost words and gathered them again. He printed early portions himself, on a press hauled across difficult country, setting the small metal letters by hand. Picture the patience of it. One verse, then another. One correction, then ten more. A man bent over paper while the years of his strength passed, trusting that what he could not finish quickly was still worth doing slowly. To translate Scripture is to be humbled by another people's speech. Moffat was humbled for decades.

And he did not work alone, though his name is the one that survived. Tswana speakers shaped every line. Interpreters, converts, teachers, and neighbours carried the words further than any one missionary could reach. The Word was passing into African hands, and African Christians would carry it on long after Moffat was gone, beyond his reach and beyond his control. That, too, is part of the truth of the story.

At last the work was done. The whole Bible, Genesis to Revelation, rendered into Setswana. It was among the first complete Bibles in an African language, set down by a man who had begun unable to speak a word of it. Think of the weight of that finished book in his hands. Years of his life pressed between its covers. Mornings he would not get back. Children grown, friends buried, a young man turned old over the spelling of grace. And now a whole people could open the Scriptures and hear God speak in the language of their own mothers.

Moffat never saw the full harvest of what he planted, and that is the shape of such callings. Some servants prepare the ground that others will one day reap. The translator labours over a word he will not live to hear preached in a thousand villages. Yet the Word he laboured over did not stay still. It went where he could not go. It was read in homes he never entered, by believers he never met, in a tongue he had learned only by listening.

What endured was not the famous son-in-law, nor the long fame of the Scottish name. It was the staggering patience of one obedient life, and a book that let a whole people read of God in their own words. Robert Moffat gave fifty years to learn how a nation said the word for love. And when the page was finally printed, the love spoke for itself.