Work in Progress

A Rowbory family blog from Nigeria

Headline mismatch

OK, headlines sometimes grab the reader unjustifiably, but this is a bit too much: RAIL WORKERS’ WIVES DESERT On 20 June, the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) commenced long distance intercity service between Minna and Kaduna (158km)… and if you read the (mildly interesting) article you’ll find out it’s about Nigeria opening up railways, but nothing …

Updated ReallyOnline

ReallyOnline, the Mac OS X dashboard widget for seeing and hearing when the internet comes and goes, has been updated to version 1.2. Main new feature: turn the voice on or off!

Swearing

That’s another workshop finished and one issue that always crops up for translation teams is what to do with Key Biblical Terms – important words and concepts that have a lot of significance and come up throughout the Bible. Often there’s a term in the translators’ language that seems an instinctively good match, but which …

Videos from recent short-term visitors

Some visiting techies from America helped set up a variety of translation teams mostly in fairly remote locations with satellite-powered internet to help connect them with consultants and other advisors. Here are some videos and interviews that one visiting technician made that might give you an insight into some aspects of translation that I’m involved …

Launch!

Hooray! Together with a great team, we’ve managed to get the new St George’s-Tron Church site off the ground. Actually there’s still lots to do (behind the scenes and in front of the scenes), but the good news for me is that others can do a lot more now without needing to ask me.

Nigeria: The first 4 months (work perspective)

Here’s a video introduction to what I’ve been doing: [youtube_sc url=12hYSb-OrGM] Watch on MobileMe (opens a new window, so you can keep the transcript in view in case that’s helpful)

Taking things littorally

Did you know that the word littoral existed? Or the word lory? Came across both when browsing the dictionary of a small Pacific language. I thought they were typos; my vocabulary has just been expanded!

A Call for Trial Publications!

David’s tentatively launching a new site for translation teams to publish trial versions of their translated work. Ideas, comments and texts all welcome!

The first ever web site in the Nya Huba language

The first ever web site written in the Nya Huba language of northern Nigeria has been created! What’s all the fuss?

Well done chicken

Here’s a quote from a book which ended up making a somewhat surprising long-term impact on our family. It’s about the problems of translating hymns into tone-languages… I have heard Dr Nida refer to a group in Liberia who were supposed to be singing the chorus, “Precious name, oh how sweet, Hope of earth and joy of heaven.” But the tune so reassigned the pitch patterns that it came out…