An excellent Melvyn Bragg film about William Tyndale expresses eloquently why people all over the world need access to the Bible in their mother tongue and gives an insight into the dramatic changes it can bring. It was on iPlayer in June 2013 and hopefully will be again. Well worth watching. We found it inspiring …
As we’ve talked about our work in Nigeria, several have asked about the language(s) I work with. One quick way to find out some basic information about any language in the world is to look it up on the SIL Ethnologue. So roughly in order of more – less involvement on my part here are a …
Here are a couple of great videos. Dineke and Klaas from the Netherlands explain a bit about what it’s like to move to a completely new place and adjust to life, language and culture there. This is Asia and many things are different to our Nigerian context, but many aspects are the same.
For those interested in the Glossy project and who might want to contribute ideas and submit improvements, there’s now a project on bitbucket. Thanks for Milt Jones and others for suggestions. There’s more that could be done, but I don’t have time at the moment to work on it. I’ll try to put together ideas for …
Foolhardy hackers (such as yours truly) can customise the UBS Paratext 7.x interlinearizer by adjusting some files found in the program folder Paratext 7\Interlinear. Here’s a brief hacker’s guide:
Last year a fellow consultant asked the best way to use the store of glosses created by Paratext’s Interlinearizer feature. This is my answer: glossy. Not a real dictionary, but a helpful alternative view. Feedback welcome.
It never ceases to amuse and intrigue me how figurative language and idioms vary wildly and dangerously between languages. I say dangerously because the unwary can be very easily deceived by the ‘literal’ or ‘word for word’ meaning. Apparently in Mark 6, Herodias ‘kept/held John in her heart’. But in Nyankpa idiom we verified that …
Here’s a disclaimer: I first came to Nigeria in 2001 on a short term trip to help people finish off a dictionary as part of a Bible translation project. I thought that might be the last of my dictionary-making, but even though it’s not really my job now I reluctantly find myself drawn back to …
Nigeria’s a great example of a place where Wycliffe’s Vision 2025 needs to be worked out. But what’s that vision? Here’s a video to explain in general: [youtube_sc clip_id=ZLWdWOoU0u4] Nigeria has the complete Bible in 19 or 20 languages. It has over 500 living languages. There are quite a few languages with New Testaments, but …
That’s another workshop finished and one issue that always crops up for translation teams is what to do with Key Biblical Terms – important words and concepts that have a lot of significance and come up throughout the Bible. Often there’s a term in the translators’ language that seems an instinctively good match, but which …