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 …
Happy Christmas, Happy New Year
We’re still working on a long-overdue letter of news, thanks to God and requests for prayer, but in the meantime we wanted to send warm greetings from Jos. It’s a little cool now, but we’re enjoying some al fresco meals together, and enjoyed gathering at church. Being a city church it seems quite a few …
Assembling Solar Panels
Together with my friend Gideon Ishaya I’ve been finally completing a project I had in mind for many years: fabricating solar panels using local components. We’ve tested the prototype panel for a few days and despite having many broken panels and the weather being cloudy, it seems to generate at least 15W but possibly more. …
May/June/July: Literacy, Translation, Holidays!
Here’s our latest newsletter, looking back at May and June and ahead to July. Do get in touch if you’d like to hear specific things next time.
You will know that I am the LORD
Reading Ezekiel with my daughter Rebekah is very interesting. The other day we had a chapter (2) that reminded her of Taffy Tegumai in Rudyard Kipling’s Just so stories. (“For they are a rebellious people.”) All the way through it’s been mildly disconcerting to have Ezekiel addressed as “Son of Man” if you’re used to …