if we want to hear from God, then listen to...

"..if we want to hear from God, we must learn to listen to another culture. We must cultivate a taste, a saving appetite, for the “other.” The word that comes to us in time from One who transcends time must be received in a microcosm of that distance, by listening, receiving, and welcoming the divine word as a foreign word, spoken with an accent, talking from a world that is not like ours.

So finally, we retain the original texts in all their ancient alienness because they force us to remember that our mission recapitulates our own redemption. We cannot speak God’s word across cultures until first we learn to listen to God’s word across cultures."
-Lawson Stone, from a post on equivalence, and a series of posts on translation