Making Luke Clear & Compelling

Meanwhile most of my time has been spent trying to work with translator Arams over patchy video links from his home in Kachia, revising Luke’s gospel. I’m pleased to report we are making decent progress and have managed to tidy up really quite a lot. Three weeks ago he travelled to our office in Jos and had much better internet access which was a great relief and was also given good technical support from colleagues in the office for which we’re all grateful. This week he’s back in Jos again and we are continuing to get everything in order, while doing some translation software training on the job.

Ashɛ events

Two exciting events are coming up for us: in November the project are planning a community event to raise the profile of the language development and Bible translation efforts, and before that in late October Arams’ daughter is getting married. We had been invited to the wedding a year ago and fully expected to be there to share their joy but that’s now looking impossible, which is very sad.

So please pray for Arams as he has so much to prepare. We will continue working to revise Luke’s gospel and hopefully re-record it and prepare other materials which we hope will encourage and enthuse people. Every time we re-read the improved translation Arams seems delighted about how much clearer and better it sounds, so I’m encouraged. But there’s a lot we still could do.

Pray that God would provide 1 or 2 suitable extra translators who will be able to commit some years to the translation efforts.

Teaching remotely: TCNN

At the same time I’m needing to get to grips with remotely teaching a cohort of students I haven’t met how to wrangle their computers to do linguistic fieldwork and build dictionaries on under-studied Nigerian languages. It’s the course I’ve taught most of the last 9 years at the Theological College of Northern Nigeria. It’s challenging when in-person, and actually I’ve long thought that a self-paced course with instructional videos, written instructions and little tests and challenges to submit would be better than too much group teaching, but it’s taking a while to come together and it’s going to be hard for many of the students to get going with it, especially the less computer-savvy ones.