Towards the translation of multilingual Bible study guides for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Southern Africa

Southern Publishing Association, the publishing house of the SA Seventh-day Adventist Churches, provides Bible Study Guides for its church members. In South Africa, the English source text is translated into five languages, namely Sesotho, isiXhosa, Tshi-Venda, isiZulu and Afrikaans. The study guides are used for home study and in Sabbath School classes. The specific aims of the article include: to discover, by means of an empirical study, whether the translations are meeting the cultural and linguistic needs of the target audience and to determine their views on the current Bible Study Guides; to explore the future of translation in a multilingual, democratic South Africa; to ascertain by means of a survey the difficulties the translators face and to suggest improvements; to establish, by analysis, how the text can be translated functionally; and to establish the effect of globalisation and whether it would be possible to localise the source texts