Michael W. Smith Faces Backlash for Endorsing Controversial Bible Translation - ChristianHeadlines.com - Translation

Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Michael W. Smith is facing backlash for seemingly endorsing the controversial The Passion Translation (TPT) of the Bible.

The translation has faced controversy since it launched in 2015.

According to The Christian Post, the TPT website included an endorsement from Smith, but as of June 1, the endorsement was removed from the site.

The initial endorsement from Smith called The Passion Translation is a "gift to Bible readers."

"It is a beautiful marriage of powerful accuracy and readable, natural language. The vivid wording strips away the centuries, reminding me with every phase that each prophecy, letter, history account, poem, vision, and parable is God's Word to me today just as much as it was to the original audiences," Smith said, according to the statement.

The statement added that the translation "encourages, convicts, teaches and comforts."

When his endorsement was shared on social media this week, Smith faced backlash for the comments. It's likely what led to the removal of his endorsement.

Smith has not commented on the issue.

Meanwhile, the TPT site includes endorsements from other pastors and church leaders.

"The Word of God is our collective and yet deeply personal love letter from above. It positions you and me within proven, godly wisdom and gives precious insight into the heart, nature, and goodness of God," said the former co-senior pastor at Hillsong Church, Bobbie Houston.

"I have loved the individual books published thus far from The Passion Translation and look forward with great anticipation to adding the entire New Testament with Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Songs to my own private (and public) reading," Houston continued. "With my husband, Brian, and our Hillsong church family, I know these pages will bring to life the One whose name is Jesus – whose passion is humanity and whose heart is for you."

TPT has faced controversy over the years. Most recently, Bible Gateway removed the translation from its site.

The TPT website states, "There is no such thing as a truly literal translation of the Bible, for there is not an equivalent language that perfectly conveys the meaning of the biblical text except as it is understood in its original cultural and linguistic setting."

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Terry Wyatt/Stringer

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Amanda Casanova is a writer living in Dallas, Texas. She has covered news for ChristianHeadlines.com since 2014. She has also contributed to The Houston Chronicle, U.S. News and World Report and IBelieve.com. She blogs at The Migraine Runner.

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What Happens When Christians and Muslims Translate Scripture Side by... | News & Reporting - ChristianityToday.com - Translation

The Bible translation ministry unfoldingWord has engaged churches across countries and cultures, but a recent project in Chad brought a new dynamic to their work: The majority of the translators were Muslim.

“We can’t take credit for having thought this up or made this strategy,” said Eric Steggerda, field operations manager for unfoldingWord, which partnered in the Central African nation with the Church Growth Project of Chad (Projet Croissance des Eglises au Tchad), or PCET.

“God brought this together in a way that created an open door that neither one of us really expected would be as effective as it was,” Steggerda said. “What we learned was that this is actually a very effective way to bridge a gap with Muslims. Bible stories are understandable.”

Muslims make up a little over half the population in Chad, and Arabic and French are the two official languages, though most people speak a variant called Chadian Arabic.

PCET identified 10 minority languages they wanted to translate and held informational workshops to recruit participants for the translation projects.

A Chadian evangelical involved with PCET—who asked that his name be withheld due to fear of violence in response to the work in Muslim communities—told CT that many initially attended the translation workshop because they were interested in the pay.

But Christians noticed that Muslims quickly latched on to the projects for reasons beyond the financial incentive. PCET and unfoldingWord were clear that the materials for translation would be Christian, but Muslim participants saw some of the stories, such as those about Abraham, as part of their religion, too.

The Chadian communities that lack Christian materials in minority languages are unlikely to have the Qur’an in their local language either, according to Steggerda.

When working with language groups with few believers or new believers, unfoldingWord recommends starting with a set of about 50 stories that take translators through the Bible to build a solid understanding of God’s Word before translating Scripture passages themselves.

Many of those stories the Qur’an narrates differently, such as the creation account, or doesn’t include at all, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan. As the Muslim translators worked through the New Testament parable, Steggerda noticed that they were particularly eager to discuss the questions that went along with it.

Another reason Muslims were interested in translating Christian material was how the project affirmed the significance of their languages.

“Many of these languages are struggling for importance in the world, as it were. There’s not much that’s actually in their mother tongue, so they rejoice when they find things that are, because it really speaks to them of the importance of their language,” Steggerda said. “Of course, anything in the mother tongue resonates in the heart better than other languages, so they’re very receptive to the idea of the Bible stories, for example, translated into their mother tongue.”

A full Bible translation for Chadian Arabic, the language spoken by the majority in the country, was completed in 2019, with copies delivered to three locations in Chad by Mission Aviation Fellowship in 2021. There are more than 100 local dialects and languages, and in rural areas, people are less likely to speak or read in French, one of the official languages.

The question that arises from involving non-Christians in translation projects, especially those who don’t have degrees or expertise in translation work, is whether the translations will be linguistically and theologically sound.

UnfoldingWord focuses on church-based translation and believes non-Christians can help develop quality translations—while also learning about Scripture themselves. The training process has translators start with easier Bible stories to learn the basics and then move on to key passages before working on entire books of the Bible, with additional training and direction along the way.

Translations are done in teams, so each individual’s translation is checked by another group member and then by the group as a whole. Even with these processes in place, the trainers noticed that translators sometimes struggled with stories that clearly contradict Islamic doctrine. In Chad, PCET brought in pastors to check each group’s translations to guard against theological errors.

The translations are also shared in each community to glean feedback in specific contexts and as a way to proclaim the gospel.

The translation project in Chad started in 2018 but was slowed amid recent civil unrest, including the assassination of the Chadian president in 2021. As PCET continues to translate and share the new materials, leaders say they have seen God reach people through the project. Two of the Muslim translators have converted to Christianity through the translation process. People in unreached communities have turned to Christ as well, including some Muslim leaders.

In one area, the local team met with several fundamentalist imams who were skeptical about the project at first. After seeing the stories in their language, the imams let the team present them to the community at large. They urged the team to come back and continue presenting whatever translated materials they could.

In another village, Steggerda recounted, the chief was very sick when the team visited. They prayed for him to recover in the name of Jesus, and he was miraculously healed. The man committed his life to Christ and urged his entire village to be receptive to the translated materials and consider what the team had to say.

PCET supports the converts in these villages after the translation projects are complete.

“There’s a 50-person missionary network now established through this organization [PCET] that’s spread out and was assigned to these different language groups,” Steggerda said. “When a convert is made in one of these villages through the translation testing process, they are turned over to the associated missionary and sponsoring church for discipleship.”

In one Muslim community, where previous missionary efforts had failed, PCET leaders wanted to try again with the new materials translated into their local language, the Chadian leader told CT.

“We just followed the voice of the Holy Spirit and went to the community, with the elders and the leaders. We projected the videos and audio [of the translations], and the result we obtained there was very great,” he said. “Immediately after we left, the missionary that was posted there planted churches, and he baptized over 10 people in December.”

“People are getting enthusiastic about hearing the gospel of Christ for the first time in their own language.”

One reason these translation projects have been such effective evangelistic tools is that they let the unreached see that the gospel isn’t just for those in the West.

“People have a lot of assumptions toward Christianity. To them, Christianity is a Western product,” the Chadian leader explained. “When they can listen to Word of God in their own language, that changes the narrative.”

In Chad, the next phase of translation features sets of Scripture passages that help build theological knowledge. Though the makeup of the translation teams is ultimately left to local partners, unfoldingWord recommends using believers from the second phase onward.

UnfoldingWord’s approach contrasts with the establish model of Bible translation, where highly educated translators are deployed to learn a language and then create a new translation. The organization’s president, David Reeves, said both approaches are needed to continue to reach all peoples of the earth.

“God has blessed and needs to continue to bless [the established model], because we can’t finish this without them finishing what they started,” Reeves said. “What the emerging model is doing is going into places that are some of the hardest left on the planet and mobilizing a much bigger workforce to be able to accomplish this [translation work].”

The PCET leader and his team know the truth of this firsthand, as they witness more unreached people hearing the gospel in their language for the first time.

“The Great Commission is the business of the Lord Jesus in partnership with the Holy Spirit. We sow the seed, and the Holy Spirit waters the seed,” he said. “We are praying we’ll see the first fruits of our labor.”

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How to translate Western diplomatic jargon - South China Morning Post - Translation

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How to translate Western diplomatic jargon  South China Morning Post

Relocation of Wayuunaiki Remote Translation Office in Colombia - JW News - Translation

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Relocation of Wayuunaiki Remote Translation Office in Colombia  JW News

Localization Professionals Mourn the Demise of Microsoft's Language Portal - Slator - Translation

Nearly halfway through 2023, the pace of breaking news on language-related AI developments continues to accelerate.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly suggested that the next wave of AI innovation will not come from ever-larger models, the company’s own large language models (LLM) and their ilk continue to inspire speculation about the future of translation. With the proliferation of new use cases, LLMs are making their way into the day-to-day work of users across industries.

For example, in April 2023, workflow automation tool Zapier announced a new integration featuring OpenAI’s Whisper API, which offers automatic speech recognition, transcription, and into-English translation, though performance reportedly varies significantly by language. Observers have praised Whisper’s quick turnaround times — a potential game-changer for competitors in the speech-to-text space.

How eager are language service providers to adopt GPT or similar LLMs? According to Slator’s April 28, 2023 survey, one in 10 LSPs has jumped on board so far, with 11.9% having already integrated an LLM into their translation management system (TMS). 

Although the vast majority (73.8%) of respondents have not yet done so, and the rest (14.3%) are unsure, Slator found that more than 90% of participating LSPs plan to apply LLMs in their business in the future. (The full survey results and a detailed analysis can be found in Slator’s 2023 Language Industry Market Report.)

By Any Other Name

With the ongoing flurry of interest in and adoption of GPT-based technologies and applications, OpenAI has decided to shut down unauthorized usage of its flagship product’s name. 

Since OpenAI introduced GPT in 2020, other AI companies have been using it to develop their own products, often incorporating GPT in the names of their brands. According to the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), OpenAI is now enforcing its branding guidelines to prevent other companies from “imply[ing] a partnership or endorsement where there isn’t one.”

Is OpenAI’s pursuit of a trademark for GPT heavy-handed or reasonable? In a May 12, 2023 survey, about two-thirds (66%) of readers said it was OpenAI’s prerogative: After all, “they were first.” Just one-third (34%) disagreed, calling the campaign “not OK.”

A Tool of One’s Own

Names also come into play when LSPs choose between owning or licensing their TMS and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools: Buyers often find themselves debating the merits of folding acquired tech under their brand.

In an unusual move, Super Agency Lionbridge signed a multiyear contract integrating tech company Phrase’s CAT tool functionality into Lionbridge’s workflow. The April 2023 announcement came less than two years after the December 2021 SlatorPod episode in which  Lionbridge CEO John Fennelly noted that up to that point, Lionbridge had not licensed a third-party TMS.

Lionbridge’s integration of Phrase technology calls to mind fellow Super Agency Welocalize, which chose a best-of-breed approach rather than the standard among most major LSPs, which own core TMS components.

Respondents to Slator’s April 21, 2023 survey confirmed that overall, LSPs take a flexible approach to the own vs. license debate, with nearly half (43.8%) stating that when it comes to TMS and CAT tools, large LSPs can do “a bit of both,” and a further 15.6% saying “it depends.” Ultimately, more than a quarter (28.1%) took a pro-ownership stance, while 12.5% said licensing would be preferable.

Long Live(d) Microsoft Language Portal

In an anomaly for language tech news, Microsoft made headlines not for introducing a new tool but for pulling the cord on its beloved online language portal. (True to form, however, Microsoft followed up by announcing a new machine translation feature just a few weeks later.)

Part multilingual online dictionary, part library of localization style guides and glossaries, the language portal was available in “nearly 100 languages.” Microsoft made the resource public in 2009, and will likely stop updating it by June 30, 2023. 

During its 14-year reign, the language portal became something of an institution, known among many IT translators as a “go-to reference” — and one without an immediately obvious replacement. 

Like it or not, the third (33.7%) of respondents to Slator’s May 5, 2023 poll who do not use Microsoft Language Portal will soon be joined by the nearly half (46.5%) who said they use it “often.” Less frequent users, accounting for almost one-fifth of respondents, access the portal sometimes (16.8%) or rarely (3.0%). 

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Backlash over ‘gender-sensitive’ Hebrew Bible translation that uses ‘God,’ not ‘He’ - The Times of Israel - Translation

JTA — A new Biblical translation that eschews gendered pronouns for God is now available through Sefaria, the online library of Jewish texts, prompting backlash on social media from some who see the change as a sacrilege.

The Revised Jewish Publication Society edition of the Bible, which the 135-year-old Jewish publishing house has released in partnership with Sefaria, is the first major update to the JPS translation of the Tanach — the Hebrew Bible — in nearly 40 years. So far, only the books comprising the Prophets, the second of the Hebrew Bible’s three sections, are available on Sefaria.

The new English translation refers to individuals with pronouns that are consistent with traditional gender norms. But unlike nearly all translations of the Bible throughout history, the new edition, known as RJPS, does not refer to God with masculine pronouns. It doesn’t use feminine pronouns either: Instead, God is referred to simply as “God” throughout the text.

For example, Isaiah 55:6 reads, “Seek GOD while you can, Call out while [God] is near.” JPS’s landmark 1985 translation, by contrast, reads, “Seek the LORD while He can be found, Call to Him while He is near.”

“The RJPS makes the case that the art of Bible translation is always a work in progress, and should take into account not only our deeper understanding today of biblical Hebrew but also the significant changes that have occurred in the use of English over the past decades,” said JPS’s director emeritus, Rabbi Barry Schwartz, in the announcement for the new translation of the Bible.

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“Tanach is the foundational text of the Jewish people, and we share Sefaria’s desire for everyone to be able to access it in language that is appropriate and meaningful for them while remaining faithful to the original,” Schwartz added.

One of 7,200 source sheets available at Sefaria.org in 2017 (JTA)

The lack of divine pronouns in the RJPS translation comes as non-traditional pronouns — and debate over their use — have become increasingly prevalent in public discourse. A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that more than a quarter of American adults know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, up eight percentage points since 2018. Meanwhile, many conservatives have decried the use of gender-neutral pronouns, and multiple Republican-led states have passed laws effectively permitting educators to refuse to use the pronouns their students prefer.

The RJPS translation, one of at least 12 available through Sefaria, has sparked backlash online from some Orthodox Jews who believe the new translation is not aligned with their values. Arguing that the translation is an example of progressive political ideology seeping into religion, some have said they will stop using the website and app because of the RJPS translation.

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Yehiel Kalish, the CEO of Jewish ambulance corps Chevra Hatzalah, announced last week via Twitter that he had deleted the app. Other prominent figures in the Orthodox world also condemned the new translation.

Rabbi Yechiel Kalish (YouTube screenshot)

“Sefaria is a tremendous resource for the [world of] Torah,” tweeted Yochonon Donn, news editor of Mishpacha Magazine, which reaches a Haredi, or ultra- Orthodox, audience. “Messing around with [holy books] to conform to western ideas of equality is an unacceptable breach. If this is true, I can’t see people learning from an unholy source.”

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, a right-wing Orthodox political advocacy organization, tweeted that “to be more inclusive of atheists, they’ll provide a ‘historically accurate translation’ that avoids mention of the Supreme Being. ‘In the beginning, heaven and earth were created.’”

Sefaria has always featured texts relevant to Jews with a range of approaches — a spectrum that has only widened as the digital library has added (and begun supporting the creation of) contemporary texts and translations.

Publishing the RJPS is “about having different translations that are available,” said Sara Wolkenfeld, Sefaria’s chief learning officer. (Sefaria’s CEO, Daniel Septimus, is on the board of 70 Faces Media, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s parent organization.)

“We are always working to include Jewish texts that are studied by the full range of Jewish learners,” she said. “And that’s why we chose to include the newest JPS translation, but among the many other translations that we’ve already hosted in the library.”

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Sefaria also has translations from Orthodox-geared publishing houses, such as the Koren and Metsudah versions, and even translations into French and German. Users can select their own preferred English translation, and RJPS is not the default translation for the Book of Prophets.

“People should know that Sefaria is a library for the entire Jewish people,” Wolkenfeld said. “And our mission is to provide access to Torah and to bring Torah into the digital age. That’s really what we’re aiming for.”

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The Skeptic - Tablet Magazine - Dictionary

There are some books that are so essential to learning something new that they become like an extension of your body. Over 20 years ago, when I was a college student attempting to learn Arabic, that book was the Hans Wehr Modern Arabic-English Dictionary.

This was right before 9/11, before many Americans were interested in studying Arabic, and there were only a handful of students in my class. Every day we would all lug the Hans Wehr Dictionary, aka “The Wehr,” around with us and plop it on the classroom table. The book was bright green, with white font and a thin red band across the bottom, and it was the only dictionary that our professor recommended that we buy.

Our Arabic professor was a brilliant Palestinian man who was not satisfied with the current Arabic language-learning paradigm and decided to write his own textbooks instead. Believing that learning one dialect is better than learning none, our teacher taught us his own mother tongue, a sweet-strong Levantine Arabic that sounded like water being poured from a jug. I’m not sure if he was aware of the history of the Hans Wehr dictionary, but at that time there was an unspoken agreement to avoid talking politics in class.

I never gave much thought to the book itself. I knew that its contents were heavily derived from Arabic literature references, rather than medieval Arabic dictionaries, and like literature, the book was both a passageway and an offering. I wasn’t even sure why I became so enraptured with Arabic in the first place, yet my love for the language was undeniable. As a Jewish girl raised in the middle of Virginia, with only a small number of Jews in my community and none in my school, I never felt like I belonged. “Otherness” became an essential part of my identity, and studying “the other” became a form of studying myself.

After I graduated, I took a job as a teacher in Egypt, eager to finally step foot in an Arabic-speaking country. But I was instantly humbled by the contrast between what I thought I knew and the reality I encountered. This was true not only about how to speak Arabic, but regarding my understanding of the Arab world. You better believe that I took the Hans Wehr dictionary with me to Egypt, but I have to admit that I found the Rough Guide Egyptian Arabic phrasebook to be a lot more helpful.

My Egyptian teaching gig was very strange—I was an instructor at a makeshift school in the Sinai Peninsula at an ecolodge founded by an Egyptian man with piercing blue eyes, who was educated in the German system in Cairo, and his German wife. Many of the guests who visited the lodge were also Germans, or Egyptians educated at German schools in Egypt. One of my most beloved coworkers, a young Egyptian man who chain-smoked Marlboros and adored poetry and Radiohead, spoke German like a native, and even the local Bedouin girls who attended our school were pretty fluent. There was a whole German scene at that place, including one Egyptian professor of history who assertively told me that 9/11 never happened, and neither did the Holocaust.

Like the dictionary, I never gave much thought to all of the upper-class, German-educated Egyptians around the lodge, but from them I learned that the Germans held a special place in Egypt that the British apparently failed to secure. The British didn’t seem to understand that chopping up the region and coercing political allegiance isn’t nearly as effective in the long run as a deliberate campaign of brainwashing and flattery. Even while the Egyptians were helping the Brits defeat the Germans in World War II, there were simpatico exchanges between Hitler and King Farouk indicating that although the British might have won the physical battle, the Germans were likely to win hearts and minds.

Read more on the Holocaust

Over months of working and traveling in the vast expanse of Egypt, I began to better understand Arabic and as a result, aspects of Egyptian culture started to unfold before me. I learned how much Egyptians loved soccer and desserts and romance. I also learned that throughout Egypt the Israelis were only referred to as “Al-Yehud”—“The Jews”—so that to Egyptians there was no distinction between an Israeli citizen, a Jew from Yemen, and one from New York. Jews were also portrayed with blatant Nazi propaganda on TV. I once had to sit through a never-ending Ramadan “musalsal”—a special holiday month soap opera that captivated the nation—where the Jewish character was literally a hook-nosed man in a black jacket carrying around a bag with a dollar symbol on it.

As a hippie, peace-loving Jewish girl who found Arabic vastly more intriguing than Hebrew and had no familial attachment to Israel, living in Egypt greatly expanded my understanding of the Middle East—but also jaded me to a devastating degree. Upon my return to the United States, I tucked the Hans Wehr dictionary away for years. The same place that captured my spirit was tainted by a constructed hatred that was still being taught.

My time studying Arabic and traveling in Egypt remained firmly in the background of my life, as I started my own family with a Brazilian husband and grew ever more distant from that youthful exploration. But a few months ago, seemingly out of nowhere I stumbled upon an article written by Khaled Diab in New Lines Magazine that hit me like one of Proust’s madeleines. Diab’s fascinating piece, “The Gifts of Jewish Arabists—and Arab Jews,” described how in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was a German Jewish woman named Hedwig Klein who was intimately involved with compiling the initial Hans Wehr dictionary.

I was stunned: How had I never known about this? A Jewish woman helped write “The Wehr”? It was like finding out that Herman Melville worked with a ghostwriter to compose Moby Dick, and that ghostwriter was your distant great aunt.

Hedwig Klein was a Jewish German Arabist who had been captivated by the Arab world, went on to immerse herself in Arabic literature, and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on early Islamic history. Much of what is known about Hedwig’s story comes from her colleagues at the time, as well as German historians, academics, and journalists, who have chronicled and elevated her incredible tale. From their accounts, I would guess that Hedwig, like other intellectual Jews of that time and place—and many of us since—found solace in studying Arabic and looking east.

Hedwig wasn’t born a German, but in 1914, just a few years after her birth, she moved with her family from Antwerp to Hamburg. Shortly after, her father, Hungarian oil wholesaler Abraham Wolff Klein, was drafted and killed in combat on the Eastern Front during the First World War. It wasn’t until 1927 that Hedwig, her older sister Therese, and her mother, Recha, became German citizens. By 1931, Hedwig had started her higher education, focusing on Islamic studies, Semitic studies, and English philology at the University of Hamburg.

It’s tragically ironic that as a university student Hedwig earned herself the nickname of “Shakkaka”—Arabic for “skeptic”—due to her reluctance to accept any dogmatic statement. In 1937, she completed a dissertation on the historical reception of Islam in Oman, receiving the highest distinction of summa cum laude. Her Ph.D. supervisor, Rudolf Strothmann, described her dissertation as “a worthy contribution to Islamic Studies,” and Arthur Schaade, the second academic reviewer, commented that it was “so diligent and brilliant that it made one wish some older Arabists could live up to it.”

Yet with Kristallnacht looming, none of these accomplishments would be enough to push her degree forward. Hedwig was denied her doctorate due to “stricter measures” against the Jewish population. Even her plea to the dean of the School of Philosophy, where she highlighted that her father had been killed while fighting alongside the Germans, didn’t grant her entry into the academic elite.

Like so many educated European Jews, Klein was probably incapable of imagining the extent of the horror that would ensue under Hitler. And yet, by 1939, with her degree rejected by the university, she was aware enough of the danger to try to escape Germany.

One of her colleagues, the notable geographer Carl Rathjens—whose work on Yemenite Jewry remains of great value to this day—consistently advocated for Hedwig’s fair treatment and safety. Through his academic connections with a British professor in Bombay, Rathjens managed to get Hedwig a visa to India. She boarded the boat and wrote to Rathjens that all looked promising, but after a stopover in Antwerp, on the cusp of the Second World War, that boat was ordered to return to Germany and Hedwig never made it out of Europe.

Instead, in a twisted event that served as both a lifeline and a death sentence, Arthur Schaade put her in touch with Hans Wehr. At that time, Hans Wehr, who was a German Arabist and a loyal member of the National Socialist Party, was rushing to complete a government-funded dictionary of contemporary Arabic. A central purpose of this dictionary would be to translate Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Arabic in order to gain the Arab peoples as allies. Because Hedwig possessed a coveted linguistic skill, she became a valuable asset to Wehr’s dictionary project.

Hedwig diligently reviewed contemporary works of Arabic literature for Wehr and would write definitions of Arabic terms on slips of paper and send them to the editors by mail. Wehr’s staff noted the “exceptional quality” of her submissions. It was both a punishment and a reward that Hedwig managed to avoid deportation while her sister Therese was sent on the fourth Hamburg deportation train to Riga in December 1941, where she was murdered.

But what does it mean to be kept alive so that your work can help kill your own people? Hedwig, who was by then required to live in state-sanctioned Jewish housing and wear the yellow Judenstern, must have known that by working on the dictionary she was indirectly assisting the Nazis to convince a part of the world she loved most to hate her.

With her only sister dead, Hedwig continued to work on the Hans Wehr dictionary for several more months, but as the tempo of the war increased, her talents, and the valiant attempts of her colleagues to protect her, were no match for the regime. Schaade had even written to government officials and argued that Hedwig was of essential value to the dictionary project and therefore to the Nazi party. But there came a point where an exceptional Jew was no longer an exception.

In July 1942, Hedwig received a summons to report for the fifth Hamburg transport of Jews—the first and only train that traveled from Hamburg to Auschwitz. After her departure, Arthur Schaade and Carl Rathjens furiously attempted to learn her whereabouts. In the ensuing years, Rathjens even managed to get appointed as her representative in absentia and publish 56 copies of Hedwig’s dissertation, eventually awarding her the Ph.D. Finally, in 1951, the Hamburg District Court granted Rathjens’ ongoing request for information and declared Hedwig dead.

A few months ago, when I first came across the article mentioning Hedwig, I scrambled to find my old Hans Wehr dictionary amid the cookbooks and children’s books and sci-fi series that had overtaken my bookshelves. Sure enough, I had kept it with me for all of these years, the way you hold onto an old love letter—not because you think that you will ever be able to fully rekindle that relationship, but to remind you that you have the capacity to love.

I paged through the opening—the section written in English that I had never cared about, and only saw her name written once, amid a sea of other contributors. In more recent editions of the dictionary, thanks to the efforts of German writer Stefan Buchen and other journalists and academics who brought her story to the forefront, Hedwig now has a slightly more detailed acknowledgment.

But seeing “Dr. Hedwig Klein” printed on the page was like seeing the reflection of a dead person’s face in a mirror. My breath became deep and concentrated. The audacity of the casual mention, one that I had never noticed even though I’d read that book enough times to have memorized the pages for each letter, was brutally stunning. What is crueler than keeping a Jewish woman alive so that her work can help translate Mein Kampf?

Like most academics, Hedwig likely never fully lived in the tangible land made of geographic borders and boundaries—she lived in the realm of thought and literature and interpretation. She was probably never able to firmly grasp the depravity of the people around her. That kind of cruelty can’t exist when your thoughts are marked by nuance, perspective, and skepticism. Hedwig’s body may have died in Auschwitz, but in her mind’s eye she was sailing on the Mediterranean, heading east.

Hedwig’s story is the story of Jews and women and academics and writers and thinkers of all sorts—the types of people who cannot help but see themselves in “the other.” But it is also the story of one Jewish woman whose talent was valued and exploited, and who remains largely unknown to this day. It’s not lost on me that I learned about Hedwig Klein from an Arab writer. I don’t know Khaled Diab personally, but writing a piece on Jewish contributions to Arab society is a brave thing to do, and through his courage I received the gift of Hedwig’s story. Diab opened himself up to the other, and with that offering he connected himself to Hedwig, and Hedwig to me, and me to him.

The irony of the Hans Wehr dictionary project is that dictionaries are intrinsically instruments of understanding. Using a dictionary literally allows you to be understood by “the other” by translating your thoughts into a language they can understand. And it also grants you the ability to speak for them, when their own voice has been silenced.

Perhaps Hedwig knew this, and she believed the greater mission of the project would override the immediate goal of translating a hate manifesto. With the help of the Hans Wehr dictionary, I could read the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish and understand not only the words, but the meaning in the melody. Because of the Hans Wehr dictionary, Khaled Diab wrote an article that made me remember what I cared about and reminded me that there are still others out there who care. And because of the Hans Wehr dictionary, I was introduced to Hedwig Klein, a kind of historic soul sister whose story I will continue to tell. May her memory, and the memory of her work, be a blessing.

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