These days in Nigeria it seems that formal education is pretty much exclusively an English-only affair and seminaries are no exception. So the experimental elective Sociolinguistics for Pastors running in ECWA Theological Seminary Kagoro has sought to shake things up a little. And with the encouragement of Provost and Chaplain, we have tried to encourage the setting […]
Category archives: Bible Translation
Scripture Listening and Reading Groups
The Scripture Engagement department of SIL Nigeria is involved in an exciting movement that is helping people engage with mother tongue Bible translations! This video introduces Scripture Listening and Reading Groups (SLRGs) and the impact they are having in language communities.
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 […]
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.
Why Bible Translation: An infographic
A little attempt at an infographic: partial brain dump explaining why I think it’s worth us (Bible translation people) doing what we do in Nigeria. Being relatively terse, and an infographic it is open to wild misunderstandings. We can deal with those in the comments. 🙂
Languages of Wilder Confusion: hidden dangers for international collaboration
I’ve appreciated the numerous short, thought-provoking articles Jim Harries has written (and also here) on topics of cross-cultural communication. One that got my attention recently was Building Castles in the Sky: A case for the use of indigenous languages and resources in Western mission-partnerships to Africa, particularly in the light of 2 realities which are close to home […]