"We’re determined to complete the translation of the Bible into the Japanese sign language and have it totally videotaped by 2018," says Eiji Matsumoto, administrative director of the Japan Deaf Evangel Mission, in an essay lately introduced on The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japan’s leading economic journal.

What motivated the young Japanese to make up his mind to devote himself to the colossal task? Matsumoto recalls an encounter, on one of the days soon after he became a clergyman at a local church in Yamagata City, with an American whose missionary experience sounded shocking to him.

According to Matsumoto, the American was one day visited by a Japanese deaf person and asked about Jesus Christ. The missionary then gave him a copy of the Bible written in Japanese and told him to read the life of Christ. However, the deaf left the church downcast, because he couldn’t read it. To the deaf, Matsumoto admits, Japanese is no more than a foreign language, while their mother tongue is a sign language.

The laborious work, or what they call the ViBi (Video Bible) project, began 12 years ago when Matsumoto and other Christians from various church backgrounds "came together with a desire for the Japanese deaf to have a Bible in their own language---Japanese sign language," the website of the Japan Deaf Evangel Mission writes.

The same translation work is now underway, he explains, in more than a score of countries of the world. And in most countries, the work is still on the threshold. "Even in the United States, one of the most advanced countries in the implementation of the work," says Matsumoto, "only the New Testament videotaped in the sign language is available."

The translation involves a lot of work and time, mainly because the mere literal translation of the Bible, not necessarily a difficult task, often fails to help the deaf understand the intendment of the Bible. Matsumoto explains this with an example of a passage from Mark 1-7, which reads: "There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose."

His first translation of the passage, more or less a unidimensional one, fell short of giving deaf people the real picture of the scene. To them, "to stoop down and unloose the latchet of someone’s shoes" had no important implication due to differences in cultural and historical backgrounds. Then he worked elaborate a plan "to render the passage with the help of superlative signs, showing how great Jesus Christ was and how humble John himself felt he was."

Accordingly Matsumoto had to put away a lot of his earlier work that most people had hard time to understand. Thus "by the trial-and-error method," however, he and his peers have gradually come to learn the ropes. He has already translated and videotaped 7% of the total volume.

In Japan, there are reportedly about 350,000 deaf people, and Matsumoto estimates that there are about 3,000 deaf Christians. He hopes their ViBi will catch the attention of as many deaf Christians as possible and help them read the Bible on videotape.

He also asked the physically unimpaired persons to preview their products, and was satisfied to find that all of them were impressed by the abundant power of expression that the sign language had. Matsumoto who became deaf when he got a fever at the age of three is convinced that "a sign language is a culture that the deaf could be justly proud of."

References: MATSUMOTO, Eiji: An Essay "Translate the Bible into Sign Language," (The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, May 17, 2004)