Making the most of being confused
Looking back I sometimes think I spent large chunks of my childhood not really knowing what on earth was going on, and being quite aware of it (yet not particularly troubled by it). And I’ve come to realise that being confused, and being aware of being confused is actually quite a helpful thing. In particular, …
A time to plant or a time to kill?
It’s been a while since I wrote anything about the Gworog project. That’s largely because the project has faced personnel management issues and then a funding crisis, and then technical problems and they just haven’t had much for me to work on. I’ve also been pretty busy. But yesterday I had a (nother) meeting with …
Correct Beer
For several months we were all mildly tickled by a massive billboard advert we would pass on our way back from church each Sunday. In astonishing simplicity it proclaimed “Correct Beer” in huge lettering beside a row of bottles. I was about to snap a picture but just before I did they changed the advert. (Fortunately Google …
Stomach Infrastructure?!
Sometimes – and especially when crossing cultures and using languages of wider communication – I come across things that people have written where I understand all the words but haven’t the faintest notion about what is really meant. Here’s a prime example, from the Nigerian news site naij.com: He said: “This year will be a year …
Tech note: Upgrading a VMware Windows 7 installation to Windows 10
Ever since the Windows 10 upgrade was announced as free I have tried off and on to install it in a copy of my Windows 7 Virtual Machine (that I run on my Mac). At least I can get on with work and life while trying major OS upgrades that way. Unfortunately it’s not worked …
Medals per Million
Update: as for 16 August 2016, Data from BBC, rio2016.com and Wikipedia: Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Popula–tion (M) Medals per Million Golds per Million Medals per GDP $m 61 GRN 0 1 0 1 0.1 9.71 0.00 1000.00 36 ARM 1 3 0 4 3.0 1.34 0.33 371.26 40 GEO 1 1 3 …
A spiral development model for Bible translations
(This post is really of interest for fellow translation folk.) More on this later, but here’s an animated diagram coming out of this thinking about Bible translation processes and this post pondering lessons from software engineering that could apply to Bible translation.
It sounds odd when you put it like that… but actually it’s just how we say it
I spent the last week working with the Koro Ashe Translation team again. They are based 3 hours to the west but we worked this week in Jos. (If you receive news and prayer requests from Wycliffe.org.uk you might have heard mention of them as they are supported in particular by some British churches.) Some …
Unexpectedly familiar: ‘Bean pods’ of Luke 15
Last week I made a discovery that surprised both me and the translation team I was working with: that the ‘bean pods’ the young prodigal of Luke 15 wanted to ‘fill himself with’ neither the generic food scraps we might think, or the sloppy grain-husk-porridge people feed pigs with here but were the fruit of a tree very …
Bottlenecks & translation systems analysis (Nigeria)
(Download print-formatted version.) How the workflow feels at the moment for many Bible translation projects: Analysis of current dysfunction Teams rapidly draft, creating a slight backlog of drafts needing team check.