Comprehension checking

We have enjoyed a refreshing break out in Goroka. The conference was fantastic and afterwards good times continued. One of my friends at MAF reached out to me and invited me for a bike ride around Goroka. It’s been ages since I’ve been on a mountain bike and it was a real treat.

We rode a 25km route around the Goroka valley and it was a new experience in PNG for me. In Kovol we are surrounded by dense jungle, but up in Goroka it’s wide open grasslands. I’ve seen the grasslands from the air, but it was completely new to cycle through them, Papua New Guinea is such an incredibly varied and beautiful country!

As our break ended we went through the usual supply-buying and packing routine. It somehow always surprises us how tiring packing is! We should be used to it by now! A 45-minute helicopter flight later and we’re back in Kovol. The helicopter leaves and we start the familiar routine of shaking hands, sweeping the house, unloading supplies and setting up the water filter.
This time, we had the new task of convincing our cat Twixy to come home. He’d been living in the village while we were away and wasn’t sure he wanted to return. He kept a wary distance from us the first day we spotted him in the village. Fortunately, Oscar had spotted some tinned cat food in the store and insisted we buy it for Twixy. Having tasted it Mr meow a lot is now convinced living with us has benefits 😀

As we return for another 4 months or so in the bush before our next break my mind turns to what my focus is going to be. What progress would I like to make?
We’re waiting on available literacy consultants to develop our literacy program and so it’s looking like BIble translation will be the focus.

This first week back I’ve been continuing to work on the Joseph story in Genesis 37. I sat with a Kovol translation helper and read him my draft paragraph by paragraph. I asked him to give each paragraph back to me in his own words. I then combined the naturalness of the Kovol audio recording in my helper’s own words and my exegetical draft which aimed for accuracy.
Linking words, repetitions and word order are great to get from the Kovol recording, but of course, sometimes my helper forgets a detail and so that comes in from my draft.

In our Bible translation process, comprehension checking follows the recording step. I take the draft and read it paragraph by paragraph to people who haven’t heard it before. Then I ask them, “Can you tell me what that talk was?” With the text in front of me I wait to see what parts come back and what parts don’t. Sometimes I reread the paragraph and ask follow-up questions. “What happened next?” “Who got the money for Joseph?” “Why do you think this character said that?” “Why did Jacob love Joseph?”
For each passage I do comprehension checks with 3 different people and I look for details that are always forgotten which indicates that some minor changes might be needed. Some paragraphs fall completely flat! When peole can’t give back any part of a paragraph it’s a good indication that we need to translate it differently.

Comprehension checking is exciting! I get to read God’s word to people who haven’t heard it before and make sure they understand it.

So what are some of the corrections I need to make? I just finished a comprehension check on Gen 37:12-36 today. The paragraph 25-28 wasn’t understood by anyone who heard it.

Then they sat down to eat. And looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing gum, balm, and myrrh, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. 26 Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? 27 Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers listened to him. 28 Then Midianite traders passed by. And they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt.

The arrival of the Ishmaelites confused people with an overload of details. My original draft used 3 sentences to introduce them saying:

They ate and they saw Ismael people. They left Gileat and wanted to go to Isip. Camels got their things their tree sap that smelled good that they wanted to sell and they went.

This verse really seemed to need a lower information load to help people understand. Here’s what my helpers and I came up with as a replacement which I’ll be comprehension-checking with yet more people:

They ate and they saw people who sell things. They were Ismael people. They left Gileat, wanted to sell things to Isip, got them and went. Good tree sap that smelled good they got, spices they got and they put it up on the backs of their camels and they went.

This version slows things down a bit more and introduces the idea of putting the goods on the backs of the camels. I’m wondering if I’ve gone too far in including implicit information here. The original doesn’t include the detail of putting goods on the backs of camels explicitly, but the original readers would have known that this is what was done. It seems to me that this is implicit information in the text and it is reasonable to make it explicit because at first people just couldn’t get this section. Is it too much though? I’m glad we have translation consultants and I’ll be sure to send them a quick email to see what they think.
I’m still finding my feet as a translator and feeling out the boundaries of what is allowable and what is not.

Judah’s question also wasn’t given back by any of the hearers. Judah gives two reasons why they shouldn’t kill Joseph. The first is “what gain is there if we do that? Let’s sell him” and the second was that he was one blood so it would be wrong to kill him. The one blood idea came across, but all the comprehension checks showed that no one remembered his first reason. Here’s the original draft:

Juda talked with his younger brothers “kill him and put him hidden” he said “what good thing will we get?” he said “sell him to the ismael people and they will get him” he said.

Rhetorical questions can be used in the Kovol language. The original presents Judah’s idea as a question and so I retained the question. It can work in Kovol. None of my listeners were able to remember it though. So I’ve now tried un-skewing it. Judah isn’t actually asking a question because he wants an answer. He’s making a statement in the form of a question. So here is the new version as a statement:

Juda talked with his younger brothers “our younger brother kill secretly and hide, we won’t get a good thing” he said “we won’t get any money” he said. “sell him to the ismael people and they will get him” he said.

In this version, the question is removed and the idea of not getting money is included because that is what he was thinking. Also notice that Judah talks to his “younger brothers” not just brothers, because in Kovol you can’t say brothers without specifying if they are older or younger. In order to communicate the idea at all in the Kovol language you have to supply a detail that the original doesn’t explicitly supply, but is there implicitly. We know Joseph is the younger brother, so we’re not actually adding anything.

So two questions. Will the new version communicate better in the next comprehension check? We’ll find out. The second question is, are these allowable translation decisions? They seem so to me right now, but I’m a brand new translator with a lot to learn. I’m glad I’ll have a translation consultant to run all these things by.

Back into the exciting and challenging world of translation 🙂 What an honour to have this task, and how great it is to read Bible portions to people and check that they understand them! WIth all the hard work at the computer to do this I didn’t take many photos. I’ll make sure I have some pictures for next week’s post!

I’ll also share with you the back translation of the whole chapter when I get it. My coworker Philip will need to do that for me as our procedure requires someone other than the primary translator to write the back-to-English version.