Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Hui-chen Lee This paper presents a unique case where a translated Bible was banned not because of religious disagreement but due to the fact that the target language into which the Scriptures were rendered conflicted with the language policy and the political ideology initiated by the government. Taiwan was open for evangelism in 1865 and with the evangelistic activities came with translation of the Bible into Taiwanese, a derivative of the dialect spoken in Fujian, China. What is unique with this vernacular is that about 25 percent of its morphemes do not have conventional representation of the Chinese character. As a consequence, the Protestant missionaries working in Taiwan and Fujian employed the roman letter to transcribe the dialect and translate the Bible. This set of romanization scheme was generally known in Taiwan as Peh-oe-ji (POJ) ‘Vernacular Script’. After Taiwan was returned to the Nationalist Party government from the Japanese colonial rule at the end of the Second World War, Mandarin Chinese was instituted as the official language. The massive official efforts to promote Mandarin, however, resulted in a discouragement of speaking and writing in Taiwanese and ultimately a complete ban on the use of Taiwanese. In this ambience, the efforts to endow the Bible with Romanized Taiwanese continued but were taken over by Taiwanese nationals. In the late 1960s, the Catholic and Protestant scholars collaborated to retranslate the New Testament into Taiwanese. This translation, officially entitled Ko-Tan Colloquial Taiwanese Version but popularly nicknamed as “Red Cover Bible” owing to its red cover, was completed in 1872, but ended up being confiscated right after it was off the press in 1973. It has never made its way to the church and has somewhat become a mystery Bible in Taiwan, which many have heard about, but few have managed to read in its book form.
