Janet Barnes is a researcher with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. 1. Background Can you explain the grace of God in everyday terms? How about the glory of God? Where would you begin to look for terms to translate the concepts of emperor, king, and governor into the language of a group of jungle Indians when the only political leader in their traditional culture is the local headman. Or how would you find terms for Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, the Sanhedrin, priest, scribe, and elders where there is no indigenous religious hierarchy? These translation problems are not without satisfactory solutions. In fact, they have been solved many times already, as the New Testament has been translated into scores of indigenous languages in the Amazon basin and elsewhere. In recent years members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics have been drawing more and more on the work of their colleagues for solutions to problems in translating the New Testament into previously unwritten languages. In Colombia the Desano New Testament was based on the Guanano New Testament. The initial draft of the Desano translation was done by a young man who grew up hearing both languages at home: his father is Desano and his mother Guanano. My earliest efforts at translation were done from the neighboring Tucano language into Tuyuca, with results that looked reasonable to me at that stage. Early on I did some translation on my own as well, using English and Spanish translations plus a Greek lexicon. I was still learning Tuyuca, so the results were mediocre and one straightforward Indian told me that my translation needed a lot of work! Even so, I compared it with the same passages that had been translated into Tucano, and was struck more by the similarity of the two translations that had been done independently than by their differences. (You must understand that Greek has notoriously long sentences, and that Tuyuca abounds in very short sentences. The average Tuyuca sentence is only 4 or 5 words long. Thus a good Tuyuca translation - and Tucano translation as well - requires massive restructuring of the information contained in clause after clause in Greek. That much, at least, the Tuyuca and Tucano translations had in common.) After some more time spent studying the grammar of Tuyuca, I decided to experiment again with a word-for-word translation from the closely related Tucano language. One of my language helpers translated the Epistle to the Colossians from Tucano to Tuyuca with no embellishments. When he finished, I checked his work for accuracy with another language helper. Then I asked my most exacting language helper to listen critically while I read the translation to him. When I finished reading, he said, 'That is really good Tuyuca.' Two women had come in as I began to read, and they agreed that the word-for-word translation from Tucano was real Tuyuca. That was encouragement enough for me, and I decided to work from Tucano from then on.