I had an interesting chat over the summer with someone wrestling with how to communicate ‘in Christ‘ in his location/language. This is an ongoing and troubling translation issue, because clearly ‘in Christ’ is an important topic in Paul’s writing and yet a little difficult to talk about clearly because it’s actually rather odd English. ‘In …
Would you encourage Christians to want to win people for Christ? Yes! Would you suggest they fight and kill them to do this? What?!! And yet that could very easily be a conclusion people reach. How? Well in Nigerian English people use ‘win’ where British English uses ‘defeat’. Source 1: Sunday school ‘this small group …
Most people around the world speak more than one language. That shouldn’t be news, but in the English-speaking monolingual world, we may need to remind ourselves of this fact. One language may be used at home and informally, but in a multilingual world, it’s useful to be able to communicate with people who speak different …
Here’s a cartoon we made, somewhat modelled on a favourite book: Look at all this mess
Just under 2 weeks ago we were shocked by the news of a colleague’s sudden death. Naboth Musa was only 23 years old, but had been a tremendous answer to prayer for the venerable Duya Bible Translation project. Most recently I had helped get him and his colleagues set up to record several books of …
Download a Printable version Sorry about the delay. I was about to send this out the week before Christmas but then — along with half of Jos — I got a bad cold that I’ve only just thrown off, which wiped me out. David. A visit to Ashe land On a Monday in the middle …
Here’s a quick thought: Why do we so often struggle to start and maintain Bible translation projects and encourage the use of completed scriptures? Is it possible that we’re offering a solution to a problem that few really recognise? And some followup questions: If it’s not obvious to pastors and people that translating the Bible …
Increasingly often I seem to be learning that the more you know, the more you realise you don’t understand. There’s a particular kind of things I’m learning at the moment – English as a Language of Wider Confusion. Words that I’ve been using turn out to mean different things to my hearers than I intend …
One long term characteristic of Wycliffe Bible Translators (and the field arm SIL) that I appreciate is a drive to continuous reassessment and improvement of what we do as we try to translate the Bible for churches around the world and help communities develop their language along the way. So over the last few weeks …
It is reasonably common on the interwebs to come across people complaining (vigorously) about Bible translations. There’s one aspect to these debates that I’ve often found peculiar but I had been unable to pinpoint the problem until recently; statements like this: