8 years of long and winding road building a competent team to translate the Bible well
8 years ago the Ashɛ Bible translators thought they had finished Luke’s gospel. I was advising them and helping them prepare it for a final detailed prepublication check, and I wanted to get some answers about the narrative flow of Luke’s gospel in the Ishɛ language, questions that the translators couldn’t reliably answer about their …
March Rowbory News: Luke before you leap
From our monthly newsletter. Do get in touch if you’d like to get this by email. Luke 8:22-52 Fear and FaithOne day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake.”… One Tuesday we considered much of Luke chapter 8 from verse 22, noticing how Jesus showed his followers …
The blessing of visitors
Soon after we returned from the UK in October, we had Katie from Glasgow stay with us for a couple of weeks as she helped introduce the Mark Drama to our colleagues. She was obviously busy with the Mark Drama, but we loved having her stay with us, and she got to meet a huge …
2024 January Newsletter
One evening after teaching, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” … A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t …
The birds of the heavens declare the glory of God
In 2018-2019 a linguist-bird-watcher produced a carefully-researched poster of the top 50 birds of Jos and central Nigeria, with birds such as the African Grey Woodpecker, Common Bulbul, Red-billed Firefinch and the exquisite African Paradise Flycatcher. The poster has English, Latin/Scientific and Hausa names for the birds but often local people know the bird and …
For Christ’s sake!
Last night I must admit getting seriously distracted while reading the Bible to my daughter before bed, by a couple of translation choices in 2 Corinthians 4:5,11 Here it is in Good News For it is not ourselves that we preach; we preach Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.…Throughout …
Conversations with a Model
Many people have been interested by a couple of OpenAI.com tools which have seen publicity recently. One is a Chat bot which has been trained to answer questions and respond in a neutral but well formed way in conversational style and the other generates images from a natural language prompt, kind of taking a caption …
NaijaType updates – a keyboard for Nigeria
NaijaType has had a little more attention recently and reached Android App version 1.9.9 and keyboard version 40. Coworker Katharine amused me by referring to it as One keyboard to rule them all and then Dee tempted me to make an elvish script adaptation of the ring poem to celebrate it. So here we are, …
Coding/Translating: Best Practice can slow you down
I enjoy reading about software development (and rocketry) and often find something that makes me think a little more about Bible Translation and how we do it. The last few years several of us have been thinking seriously about the quality and processes of what we work on, developing and thinking through implementing ‘Best Practices’ …
Coding/Translating: Taking a fulfilling demotion
Before I had a thought of doing Bible Translation my first hobby and possible career choice was in Software Engineering.* I got diverted from that after graduation, but I like to keep abreast of what people are doing and learning in the programming and development world, and so I came upon an interesting article about …