A Heart

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 means she nursed a grudge against him.

Right at the end of Mark 6 we hear that the disciples were amazed at Jesus walking on water because they hadn’t learned anything from him feeding 5000 hungry guys. Instead their hearts were hard. The Hebrew ‘hard heart‘ idiom runs through the whole Bible. And we use that idiom in English too. Unfortunately though the individual words might be the same, the actual meaning intended is quite different. In English it means unsympathetic doesn’t it? But mostly in the Bible the ‘literal’ hard hearted really means ‘unrepentant’ or stubbornly unresponsive to God. Apparently in another Nigerian language Fulfulde, in such situations they would say ‘hard headed’… which also has a different meaning in English, doesn’t it? What fun! No, really it is.

Hard

Scientific Excursus: I guess for the scientists among us it’s a little like Chemistry: both hydrogen and oxygen are nice gases with their own uses and properties, but put them together and the meaning (behaviour, uses) of H₂O has nothing to do with the uses and behaviour of its constituent parts. How much less should we be surprised then when something parallel happens in language.

The pity is that while our mother tongues tend to shape our perceptions of idiomatic meanings and the way we divide up the world, people are rather too quick to assume they know what the words someone else uses mean. Words like ‘hard’ and ‘heart’ are apparently easy to translate, and so the idiom ‘hard hearted’ has been faithfully transferred from Hebrew and Greek into English in most Bible translations, one word at a time. Diligent pastors studying the Bible realise that the idiom isn’t being represented perhaps quite so helpfully and so after enough decent sermons, established Christians may get the ‘actual meaning’ of an idiom like ‘hard hearted’ beaten into them as special ‘Bible talk’. And thus another part of our life has become segmented into Christian stuff, and the rest of life.

And apologies: while this is related to my writing on why literal is meaningless, I haven’t actually finished writing that.

In the minds and affections of the home Church in modern days the place of Uganda has been unrivalled. It has been a name to conjure with. The early heroes and martyrs, whose names are now household words in English Christian circles; the action of the Church, good or otherwise, in saving Uganda for the Empire; the phenomenal progress of Christianity; and the testimony alike of travellers, statesmen, and traders, as to the real uplift of the people–all these have conspired to give Uganda a unique position. The country, however, has done more than attract attention to itself; it has stimulated interest in the missionary cause everywhere and put fresh vitality into men’s faith in Jesus Christ.

The rest of the 1921 account entitled Dayspring in Uganda, by Albert Lloyd, mentions another hero (George Pilkington of Uganda) and quite a lot of stimulating reflection on mission in Africa. Another interesting quote from chapter 4:

By the end of 1898… the number of native teachers doubled within a year and reached the total of 2000, and year by year their ranks were augmented. Here let it be said that all these teachers were supported by the native Church, not one cent of foreign money going to this purpose. The earnest desire of the Uganda Mission from the very first has been to make the Uganda Church self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending, and up to the time of writing [1921] this ideal has been maintained.

Now, if only someone at NEGST/AIU would scan and OCR the Pilkington of Uganda book that we read in the library there, and save it for the public domain. There are stories that the world needs to read. Unfortunately a lot of the time these accounts have been written for a British audience and so understandably dwell more on things and people that British folk would understand, be interested in and identify with. So Ugandans (and other Africans) may find it sad that there’s not so much written by and about the Ugandan ministers and missionaries. Let’s not be unjustly harsh on the writers though.

Later in the car she was telling Mummy the same story. “But aren’t you Scottish or Northern Irish?” Mummy said. “Tomorrow I might be Scottish but today I’m Nigerian,” was pretty much her reply. Oh the confusions of identity. She’ll continue to have some working out to do, I guess, as she switches between places and people.

But to us, she’s Rebekah.

Here’s our group’s official statement:

Around 7:30 a.m. local time on Sunday morning (26 February), a suicide car bomber approached and detonated a bomb outside of a large church in Jos. Initial reports vary, but it appears as though at least five people were killed with others being injured. This attack was then followed by shooting and burning elsewhere around the city in retaliation for the bombing. There are no reports of any Nigeria Group staff that were directly involved in any of the morning’s violence, though most if not all of us have friends or acquaintances who might have been.

Please pray for the situation here, and following are a few thoughts to guide those prayers:

· Please pray for those who have been affected by the attack—whether it be through injury, death or fear.

· Please pray for the security forces as they handle the situation and the complex challenges that arise from such an incident.

· Please pray for the people of Jos. Jos has a history of tension which can flare up easily. Please pray for calm and restraint in times like this.

· Please pray for us – and our friends and colleagues living in Nigeria – as incidents like this can cause anxiety and fear. Please pray that the Lord would use us in ways that will promote peace and bring about His message of salvation.

We appreciate your prayers.

How to open the configuration file in Notepad:

• Open your Documents (or My Documents) folder and find the WeSay folder there.
• Open the folder for your language.
• Right-click on the WeSayConfig file and choose Open With > Notepad.

Sample tasks:

Look through the tasks below and find one you like. Copy everything from <task> to </task> then paste it after one of the </task> tags that you find near the end of the Config file. You’ll need to customise at least the writingSystemsToMatch for your language code.

Add Hausa Meaning

<task taskName="AddMissingInfo" visible="true">
  <label>Hausa Meanings</label>
  <longLabel>Add Hausa Meanings</longLabel>
  <description>Add Hausa meanings (senses) to entries where they are missing.</description>
  <field>definition</field>
  <showFields>definition</showFields>
  <readOnly>semantic-domain-ddp4</readOnly>
<writingSystemsToMatch>ha</writingSystemsToMatch>
<writingSystemsWhichAreRequired />
</task>

Add English Meaning

<task taskName="AddMissingInfo" visible="true">
  <label>English Meanings</label>
  <longLabel>Add English Meanings</longLabel>
  <description>Add English meanings (senses) to entries where they are missing.</description>
  <field>definition</field>
  <showFields>definition</showFields>
  <readOnly>semantic-domain-ddp4</readOnly>
  <writingSystemsToMatch>en</writingSystemsToMatch>
  <writingSystemsWhichAreRequired />
</task>

Adding a phonetic form

<task taskName="AddMissingInfo" visible="true">
<label>Phonetic</label>
<longLabel>Add Phonetic Form</longLabel>
<description>Add an IPA transcription to words which don't have one yet.</description>
<field>EntryLexicalForm</field>
<showFields>EntryLexicalForm</showFields>
<readOnly>semantic-domain-ddp4, definition</readOnly>
<writingSystemsToMatch>grh-fonipa-x-etic</writingSystemsToMatch>
<writingSystemsWhichAreRequired />
</task>

Adding audio recordings

<task taskName="AddMissingInfo" visible="true">
    <label>Audio Recording</label>
    <longLabel>Add Audio Recording</longLabel>
    <description>Add an audio recording to words which don't have one yet.</description>
    <field>EntryLexicalForm</field>
    <showFields>EntryLexicalForm</showFields>
    <readOnly>semantic-domain-ddp4, definition</readOnly>
    <writingSystemsToMatch>grh-Zxxx-x-audio</writingSystemsToMatch>
    <writingSystemsWhichAreRequired />
</task>

Acknowledgements & References

Thanks to http://atoznback.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/new-wesay-tasks for the inspiration.

Bible translation projects require a good foundation of linguistics to work out a decent writing system and to help writers stay as faithful as possible to the natural grammar of the language whilst staying as faithful as possible to the meaning of the biblical text. Along the way some translators and advisors collect words into a dictionary. Most are never completed, never published. Some Bible translators eventually get round to working on a dictionary after the Bible has been published. Well surely that priority is right for a Bible translator, isn’t it? Yes and no, but mostly no, I reply.

The fact is, words are slightly slippery things and one of the biggest dangers to faithful translation can come when you are too easily satisfied by equivalences found between languages without really testing out the range of meanings and usages that a word can sustain. Unfortunately the most common conception of translation (whether it’s Westerners or Africans) is somewhat akin to simple word-swapping; we just try to find the closest equivalent word as we see it for what we understand of the source word.

Well, apart from the fact that it’s sometimes difficult to be very precise about what is a word, what’s a ‘particle’ or an affix and what’s a phrase, such word-for-word correspondence doesn’t really work. Words, like the people who utter them, don’t thrive in splendid isolation but live in communities of meaning. That’s how we learn new words!

So to describe one word in a Nigerian language with just one English ‘gloss’ is often misleading. You don’t believe me? Well take a nice simple example from the human body.  Surely this is going to be the simplest case, since we all have bodies which are largely the same. Let’s take ‘hand’. Ask a Nigerian what ‘hand’ is in his mother tongue and he’ll tell you. Easy. Not really! Ask him exactly what he means by hand and you’ll get a variation somewhere between the tips of the fingers up to elbow or shoulder. It’ll include what my English means by ‘hand’ but a lot more. But then Nigerian English ends up taking the meaning from the mother tongues and hey presto, misunderstanding results!

So while a decent multilingual dictionary should use glosses to quickly and concisely convey as much meaning as possible, it must go further and use a bit more space to explain the range of meanings and the limits. We haven’t even begun to look at figurative uses.

But I began by complaining that it’s no good thing to leave making a dictionary to the post-Bible phase. That’s because a dictionary – especially a dictionary organising words by  meanings, or a thesaurus – can help the translator and any advisors think of alternative words or phrasings that otherwise might not occur to them. And it can help consultants check that the real sense of the original passage is being conveyed well, just as Biblical Greek/Hebrew dictionaries are much more helpful than glosses in understanding the range of uses of a Greek or Hebrew word.

Quite often absolutely needless conflicts arise because we assume one-to-one word-to-word correspondences between different languages which do not hold up. We each are coloured by our home culture and to some extent see the world through the lens we grew up with. So it may seem obvious what ‘father’ and ‘son’ mean, but in actual fact some languages may have much richer or subtly different collections of kinship terms all with their own generality or specificity and range of uses. To ignore the linguistic riches available and use a smaller vocabulary that appears to match English is an unnecessary constraint. But it may be that it is taking the time to develop rich dictionaries that will let us move beyond that constraint.

With programs like WeSay it’s easier than ever now to recruit whole communities to build dictionaries, so it’s no longer the preserve of elite linguists, but so that dictionaries can become a repository of the linguistic knowledge of a community. And thus dictionary-making doesn’t need to hold up (delay) a Bible translation programme but can actually hold up (support) better translation.

Thoughts? Please share below.

The idea is that a more computer-savvy ‘advisor’ sets up a dictionary project in a Configuration Tool with all the right language settings and then transfers it (via USB drive) onto each computer that is going to be used. Then budding mother-tongue linguists open the main very straightforward program to do one task at a time to start building up the database: first gathering words and then documenting them. Every so often they click Send/Receive to exchange information with the USB flash drive, and pass it on to others. At any time every computer should have a fairly complete copy of what has been worked on and people can click one button to produce a draft dictionary. Whenever they see the advisor, the USB flash drive can be passed on and the advisor can bring the data into FieldWorks for other analysis and perhaps tidying up. Any relevant changes can be passed back by Send/Receive with FieldWorks.

We’ve started using WeSay in Nigeria, using the development version 1.1, soon to be finished into a stable version 1.2. We’ve discovered a few little quirks along the way which the developers at Palaso have very quickly fixed. In another post I’ll describe some special ‘hacks’ that you can do pushing WeSay beyond what the Configuration Tool lets you do. Some of our favourite aspects of WeSay include:

• You can make a sound recording of a word right there within the dictionary at the touch of a button.
• It puts the focus completely on the language rather than the complexities of software.
• It uses standard LIFT file format and XML configuration files, which can be easily modified by hand if necessary.
• Information can be shared with FieldWorks both ways (using LIFTbridge)
• There is no save button; everything is automatically saved and a history kept using the Mercurial Distributed Version Control system.

Currently the most recent version is most complete on Windows, but Linux development is progressing well. Documentation is a little out of date, but it’s all being revised.

‘Literal’ is a darling word for many, attractive because it suggests straightforward, direct and reliable communication. However, the fact is that it gets used to mean quite a few different things by different people and if subjected to sufficiently intense scrutiny the assurances it offers are shown to be meaningless. While carrying emotive power it lacks utility making it as dangerous as counterfeit medicine.

Is that controversial? Well I think it’s not only true but fairly obvious, and in a while I’ll explain and I’ll also go into some of the implications. Watch this post.