Work in Progress

A Rowbory family blog from Nigeria

The problem with problem solving

Problem solving is at the heart of what drives programmers and many other folk to make things better. The problem is, there may be quite a variety of ways to solve a problem, some of which end up storing up bigger trouble ahead. And VW seems to have fallen into that trap.  I would love to …

A flood of migrants – desperate to get away, determined to survive

Happened across an interesting article which came my way, talking about some migrants: He was quite taken with the story of S_____ travelling to _____ on boats like the ____ and the horrendous conditions they experienced during those voyages. “It shows how desperate they were to get out of S____. They were sold on the idea of hope …

Fixing the fix for NTFS drives on Mac OS X (10.10 Yosemite)

A friend had a troublesome external Hard drive that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t mount in Mac OS X, having some corruption issues and being an NTFS format drive. Disk Utility helpfully said: Verify and Repair volume “xxxxxxxx”Repairing file system.** /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix has been disabled because of volume corruption issues. ** If you still want to try …

On Glosses, GPS and Google Maps

The short version: Place too much faith in a ‘gloss’ for a foreign word and you may well end up looking as foolish as the folk who follow their satnav robotically into oblivion. An allegory from Google/Apple maps for all users of bilingual dictionaries: As drivers become enslaved to their satnavs (in the well-mapped world) …

A little plug for Wycliffe in Nigeria, from a British MP

A search on the internet often throws up surprising results and one was the mention of the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators in Nigeria, by Lib Dem MP Mark Williams, MP for Ceredigion. In talking about why it’s important for Christians and governments to engage in international aid, page 59, he mentions “Wycliffe Bible Translators …

Newsletter 42: Not in Nigeria!

Here’s some news for June/July 2015 from the Nigeria branch of the Rowbory family (High Quality Printable Version) With a whirlwind of final meetings, David wrapped up his solo month in Nigeria and returned to the heart of the family at the start of May.  By then they had moved over from Northern Ireland to Glasgow …

Research in progress: Making dictionaries serve translation

Here’s an abstract that has been approved for presentation at a Bible Translation conference: Making dictionaries serve translation John Roberts has lamented the tendency of Bible translators to ignore lexicography until after a New Testament has been completed and printed. The consequence is that while the translation process necessarily reveals much of the lexical richness …

The Curse of Assumed Similarity

Near-misses are the bane of the translator’s life and work. In the same way that a falsehood is more dangerous when it contains a large element of truth, terms or thinking that seem nearly similar between cultures create a very dangerous translation environment. One handy example of this is the term ‘curse’. What is a curse? …

Don’t look back… but… Kirk Zero by 2037?

It suddenly dawned on me that May was coming round, and for most of the past 8 years that meant there would be some kind of trouble and rumpus regarding the Church of Scotland annual General Assembly. It’s actually a great joy to be able to put all that behind us now. Indeed, Phillip Jensen …

When FieldWorks & SayMore installations struggle with a DotNet issue…

Several SIL tools like FieldWorks Language Explorer (Flex) and SayMore depend on the dotnet framework. (That’s a bit like Microsoft’s answer to Java.) Unfortunately it sometimes falls over. So I found a rather handy blog post that explains what to do when you try installing DotNet 4.0 and it sits still for ages then responds …