Getting ready for Bible translation

Having now finished my full-time language study it’s time to move on to preparing for a few things.

• Literacy
• Bible translation
• Bible lessons

They all need to go together! You can’t have Bible lessons without Bible translation, and you can’t have a translation which no one can read, but you can’t have confident readers without lots of reading material in the language! There’s a lot to get ready!

I started the week with a translation kick-off. I had a phone call with a translation consultant here in PNG who talked me through the procedure, the available tools and a suggested order to translate. With the kick-off done, I’m ready to start translation.
At some point, I’ll get to attend a team translation workshop where my teammates and I along with some Kovol helpers are led through the process and use the workshop to draft a chunk of scripture under supervision. One of these isn’t scheduled just yet, so after my kick-off, I’m ready to have a go.

What do you think the first verse to translate would be? John 3:16? That’s a famous one, but actually, I’ll start with Genesis 37:1

Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan.

Not too bad right? That’s the idea! The Joseph story is a long chunk of simple narrative text, which should make it more straightforward. We will be using this as part of our initial Bible teaching so it’s also something we’ll need quite early on. There are 280 verses to translate for the Joseph story and once I’m done I’ll message a translation consultant and arrange a check. No one’s going to take my word for it that I translated the passage well. It all needs checking by an expert 🙂

I also needed to get some new software. First of all, I got my hands on Translator’s Workplace made by SIL. This is a package through Logos Bible software only available for approved translators. It consists of 1,800 or so books and resources; multiple exegetical commentaries for every book in the Bible, translation commentaries and translation handbooks. It’s an overwhelming amount of material! I’ve just gotten my hands on a lifetime’s reading material! I paid a small fee to get the package, but I can see it already contains some commentaries I’ve already purchased and read on Kindle for £30 a piece. I have no idea what the total value of all 1,800 resources is, but it’s an absolute bargain! Thanks SIL!

Alongside this I installed and registered Kovol as a translation project in Paratext. This will be the program in which I draft, edit and check the translation. It’s full of features and I spent some time this week watching the video tutorials on their website. Now I’m all set up and I open the window to a completely blank page. I can flick through all the books of the Bible and see zero words anywhere. It’s intimidating starting a translation! So much work to do!
Once I get to the stage of the back to English translation of the Kovol translation I’ll be sure to share it with you.

Any day I want to I can start. The first step is exegesis. I need to study the paragraph I will translate and get an insight into what the original languages were saying and then I need to have a crack at writing it in Kovol. As exciting as that is I haven’t started. It doesn’t feel like work to sit down and study the Bible, it feels like free time… so I haven’t started yet. I’m still in language learning mode and sitting on my own studying a Bible passage doesn’t feel like work yet, work is being out with Kovol people!

There’s also another priority right now for the literacy program. To figure out which sounds to teach in our literacy program first I need to gather together a lot of natural Kovol text on which a computer can do a syllable frequency count. I need about 20,000 words of natural written Kovol. Since we’re the only ones who write in the Kovol language right now that’s meant digging through our culture file to pull our transcriptions out and build a 33-page document of Kovol text. Having built the document now I’m busy working through it to check the spelling. I’m able to produce a spell check for the Kovol language. I need to teach that spell check one word at a time, but that’s a process I’ve been working on for the last year.

The primary focus of most of this week has been gathering that text and working on spell-checking it. To get 20,000 words I included some of my older material and some of that requires another listen so I can correct my younger self who got many of the words wrong!

The Kovol people have been very excited that I finished my language study. They know the literacy program is coming next, but I don’t think they expected that it would require weeks of me behind my computer working on documents 🙂
I decided to introduce one activity as a pre-literacy exercise, puzzles! I’ve left out some of the jigsaw puzzles that our children no longer play with and they have been a hit! People love to come and have a go at them and it teaches them to recognise and work with images. a pre-requisite for literacy. My next task is to take some photos of Kovol people, places and objects and make new puzzles out of those.

I feel like there isn’t enough time in the working week to get done everything I want to do. Preparing a collection of texts with correct spelling is a mammoth task that takes hours and hours of diligent work. The whole time though it feels like it’s keeping me from Bible translation, and that’s keeping me from spending time with Kovol people, but when I sit with Kovol people I remember the text collection I’m supposed to finish! Lots of exciting work to do.
Even as I sit and write now I hear Kovol voices outside and realize that this blog has taken long enough, I need to be out with them, we have spelling to check!