SteveStanley

The Bible is a very complex text to translate. As I draft new passages I routinely come across vocabulary challenges.
The latest challenge is also a grammar challenge:

As preparation for the Kovol literacy class, we need to produce practice reading materials. The number 1 reason literacy graduates don’t cement their skills and make literacy a part of their lives is lack of practice. Some estimate that students require at least 600 hours of reading practice, without which graduates may slip back into illiteracy.

This week we’ve had the Kovol people helping us in a big way. They cut bamboo in the jungle, carried it to our house and then walled in parts of our houses. The Hansen family had recently had an extension built onto their house and my little office under our house hadn’t had an exterior wall put on yet.

It’s been an exciting week for us. We’ve been without coworkers in Kovol since July and we are delighted that the Hansen family have returned to join us! Actually, Philip has joined us with Natalie and the kids still in Goroka for now. We need to wait an extra week to see Natalie and the new twins, and Oscar have his playmates back.

“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 🙂

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.

Once a year the missionaries of our central area meet for conference consisting of tribal reports, fun and Bible teaching. The central area consists of the highlands of PNG and the Madang area where Kovol is, so that’s the one we attend. PNG is a large country and so we also have Western and Eastern areas, and they have their own conferences.

For one of our post-literacy readers, I thought it would be fun to write a short story about a time Gerdine and I went to a Kovol garden with our friend. Readers need illustrations to go with them, so I’ve been working on illustrating my own story 🙂

As I step into translating into the Kovol language I certainly feel overwhelmed! Translation isn’t a task where there is a simple right answer and wrong answer, it’s a complex spectrum of choices. It’s possible to be too free and end up paraphrasing on the one hand and being too wooden on the other. It’s possible to have correct sentences that all work, but don’t fit together as a paragraph. There are choices to be made on how much “glue” to add to help the sentences hang together. There are choices to be made in how to translate new vocabulary and concepts. There’s the fact that one helper prefers to use this word and say it this way, and another prefers to say it that way. Are the different opinions simple stylistic variations? Does one flow better? Which term really fits the original meaning best?