“Stomach pain hit us” is the translation of the title. You don’t catch a stomach bug, it hits you; and if you think about it that makes more sense. When you want to catch something you have to try, but sickness usually finds you on its own 🙂

Getting some rest this week

Gerdine needed to spend 2 days off from homeschool to recover from a stomach bug and since I’m the only substitute teacher around, translation work also stops. Our family all caught the same thing and it has ended up being a slower week.
It’s great the way God has designed our bodies though. We’ve fought it off and recovered. It’s also a good example to the Kovol people. White people get sick too!
Even missionaries get sick and struggle, and that is quite unexpected for the Kovol people. Not that we have them come in and stand over our sick beds so they can see us being miserable though, perhaps we should do 😀

While I didn’t get Gen 39 checked and tested like I was hoping I did get most of the way through testing half of it and corrections on Gen 37 have continued.

“Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”
Gen 37:20

Comprehension checking

I’d translated cistern as “nomol tumunn” a water hole. In Kovol there’s a difference between a hole dug by people and a naturally occurring one. This phrase then should convey the meaning nicely. During my comprehension checks, however, 2/3 of the people who retold the story to me said that the brothers threw him into a “sinnol pee”, an animal hole. “Pee” of course is a naturally occurring hole. Curious I asked them about it and both said they threw Joseph into a lion’s hole.
The response surprised me. I read the verse again. What kind of hole was it? Both correctly responded saying a water hole.
Today I finally figured out why initially they answered incorrectly.
The brothers planned to say that a ferocious animal had devoured him. I hadn’t signalled properly that this was just their plan. A llon didn’t eat Joseph, that was just hypothetical. I had tried to signal that, but obviously, it wasn’t enough. My two comprehension checkers misunderstood the part about the wild animal. They thought that this wasn’t just hypothetical and they were working to include it as an event that happened in the story.

Problem identified, what’s the solution?
I’m going with “We will throw him into a water hole” they said. “Afterwards” they said. “We will lie” they said. “We will say an aggressive animal killed him”.
I can use much of the same wording as before, but add in that “afterwards, we will lie” part, hopefully reinforcing that hypothetical component. Will it be enough? I’ll have to do a comprehension check with someone new to see if they repeat the same misunderstanding as before.
Translation really is a fun challenge!

Gerdine has been learning about how the Kovol people make traps

When first person responded saying it was a lion hole I brushed it off as a silly mistake, but when the 2nd guy said exactly the same thing I had to puzzle over where that was coming from.

It’s a great joy though when paragraphs communicate perfectly. Some of them can be quite long, 4-5 verses. When everyone I check it with can accurately give it back with all the details it’s an incredibly satisfying feeling. That’s not all of the paragraphs though. The Ishmaelite traders arriving from last week is still giving me problems this week!

Testing out the new readers

I’ve been continuing to work a bit on post-literacy readers too. This week I was working on nailing down the format and getting my printer to cooperate with printing an example booklet. Once printed I handed the booklet to some guys to look at. I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of our guys reading it! He was reading slowly, but he was reading accurately. It works! The alphabet we developed for the language works! We’ll see if every part of it works fully with time of course, but it’s a great boost to see people enjoying looking at and attempting to read the first bits of reading material we are producing.

Oscar is losing teeth

2 Comments

Tessa B · 31/10/2024 at 4:17 pm

So sorry that you’ve all been under the weather this week—so rough! I hope that you are all feeling better now and have regained your strength.

Lois S. · 01/11/2024 at 12:05 am

Thanks for sharing more about the translation process. I am glad you are feeling better. If you don’t want to have them standing by your sick beds seeing you be miserable, you could (and maybe did) at least tell a story about it. This could help them see with their mind’s eye.

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