Community Translation and Oral Performance of Some Praise Psalms within the Zulu Community

Abstract

There is a strong history among the Zulu community of performing praise poetry, and a passion for composing and performing poetry continues among Zulu youth today. On the other hand, the current Zulu Bible is considered by many young people to be irrelevant or difficult to read and understand. With these two factors in mind, I conducted a study in which Zulu youth were invited to participate in basic training, after which they made their own translations of various praise psalms and then performed them before a community audience using song, rap, or spoken poetry. This paper looks at the process and benefits of inviting “ordinary speakers” to participate in the translation process, and of communicating the message through oral performance. The results are encouraging and suggest the methodology could be extended to other genres of biblical text and other language groups.