Ishɛ translation update: I’m a wondering about ‘amma’…
Years ago when starting work with the Koro Ashɛ translation team (whose language is called Ishɛ) the translators asked me about an issue they had. There were too many Hausa words in it. In particular the word ‘amma‘. It’s a common conjunction rather like English ‘but‘ and you do actually hear it frequently in conversation. …
Rowbory family & ministry update 2019
Merry Christmas, everyone! We’re enjoying being around friends and family in the UK for Christmas for the first time in 4 years, but missing our friends and co-workers in Nigeria. We have now been in the UK for nearly 6 months, and had various plans for our time here which haven’t exactly worked out, but …
Are we gospelly?
A rare guest appearance from Julie! (Perhaps I’ll persuade her to contribute more here.) Sometimes we may think we have thought of something for the first time and it turns out that someone else got in there before us. In Bible translation work nowadays we are committed to using local languages to express Biblical concepts, …
What progress in 8½ years in Nigeria?
It’s good to look back on what we hoped to do when we first went to Nigeria in 2011 and assess our progress. My hope had been that I’d go with my English, knowledge of Bible and theology and Biblical languages, and meet translators who spoke some English, as well as their language and rather …
12 years 4 months + 19 days since we were commissioned
It’s 12 years, 4 months and 19 days since we were commissioned in the Buchanan Street building just before we headed to Kenya. Much has changed since then hasn’t it? We went to Nairobi to begin 2 very useful years of study and training in Bible translation. We were overjoyed when Rebekah joined us after …
Discourse Analysis and Translation: an introduction
I’ve been doing lots of ‘discourse’ study recently and some people have asked how they can find out more about it. The people to read: Teach-yourself courses for discourse discovery for source and target languages and translation between them Steve Nicolle: Narrative Discourse and Translation – example from Acts 16 (Free direct download PDF) Steve …
Did you know… Mary Slessor
Did you know, that… a corner of Nigeria featured on a British banknote for many years all because of a lass from Dundee? Over the years in Nigeria as I’ve got to meet people from different places and we have talked about where we’re from, it’s been notable how many people know (roughly) about the …
Languages of Wilder Confusion: Keep
The simple word keep couldn’t easily be confused could it? And yet in Nigerian English it refers to storing something somewhere — putting something away. So a friend told us about a time when a neighbourhood child came to her house and was playing with a little toy and the friend said she should keep …
Languages of Wilder Confusion: Big Words, Big Trouble
“What I like about English,” a student pastor told me at the end of one class, “is that you have so many special words for things, so that means you can think and talk about so much more than we can in our own languages.” This sounds fairly convincing. English has a word ‘justification’ and …
Another ‘eggcorn’ or ‘cat phrase’: Hand your head in shame
Reading a comment here criticising Apple the writer finished with a surprising rhetorical flourish: “Go hand your head in shame, Apple: you’re still not doing software engineering right.” Now, when you’re lambasting someone for doing something stupidly wrong, wouldn’t you try to make sure you don’t do the same thing yourself? Of course in true …