As a Quebecois, I live my Christian life in a translation limbo between several languages and cultures that is often humourous, sometimes frustrating and occasionally enlightening.

My collected file of quirky mistranslations has swelled since the advent of automatic translation software. It includes an e-mail from “the church of the alarm clock” sent by a leading denomination known as the church of revival. The French word for revival can either mean a revival or an alarm clock and the software guessed wrong.

In the religious section of the greeting card display at a large retail store I recently found a Virgin Mary prayer candle with the text of the Hail Mary. The automatic translator had read “hail” as a meteorological phenomenon and rendered the prayer in French as “Grele Marie.”

Misunderstood words can make us laugh, but they can also skew our perception.

A newsletter from an American group urged prayer for Quebec, bemoaning our current French Bible as hopelessly outdated. A surprising comment since our 1910 revision by theologian Louis Segond was a few years ahead of the 1611 English version the American group used! Someone mistook theologian Louis Segond for King Louis the Second who reigned over parts of France until shortly before his death in 876 but who, unlike James of England, would never have had anything to do with a Bible translation!

If words can be misread, how much more cultural sensitivities!

When Alpha Canada’s “explore the meaning of life” ads blitzed the country, the results in Quebec apparently left much to be desired. The cryptic ads’ picture of people from different ethnic groups, the word Canada in large letters and the resemblance to recent Liberal campaigns led many unchurched people to conclude they were about some new Federal multi-culturalism program. In the days of Gomery fury in Quebec, anything with possible links to federal Liberal ad sponsorship dollars was not positive. I found myself praying my neighbours and friends wouldn’t connect the ads with Christianity!

One of the biggest lessons I have learned living between two cultures is that just like words, concepts and approaches cannot be automatically translated without giving thought to the context.

I grew up in a denomination whose most recent roots in middle class American suburbs meant that Sunday attendance at 9:30 a.m. communion, 11 a.m. family Bible hour and 7 p.m. gospel services were sacrosanct barometers of spirituality. When the first churches were planted in small Quebec farming communities it took decades for imported suburban Christian workers to understand that the farmers’ repeated absences at Sunday meetings had less to do with their spiritual fervour than with their cows’ health.

We realized a while ago that the Bible was best translated by going directly from the originals to English without the intermediary step in Latin. Similarly, as the Quebec church matures, rather than continuing to “translate” from English Canada concepts they had previously adapted (not always accurately I might add!), we are now thinking creatively about how New Testament church concepts apply directly to our context.

The best thing English Canadian churches can do for Quebec is not to automatically export concepts that worked well in Medicine Hat, Vancouver or Halifax, but to encourage the church here to go back to Christ’s very original concept of church and to import it meaningfully in what is in so many ways—dare I say it?—a distinct society!