Never before had a rainbow seemed so threatening. It was on the walk to school this morning. With the clouds rushing towards the low winter morning sun overhead, I looked West and saw a rainbow. Actually it was my daughters who spotted it first and they love a good rainbow. But where they saw pots …
Grace is one of those words that most Christian kids or young Christians end up being taught is special and has a special meaning. That’s great, but in my role as a Bible translator I’m starting to get a little concerned about words like that. OK, we all know that grace is… (fill in the …
Some time I may get round to writing a paper on some cross-disciplinary lessons that Bible translators can learn from Software Engineering. (This is essentially trying to integrate my former and current career paths.) My attention was caught by a slightly overblown headline on favourite irreverent geeky news site The Register: Most developers have never seen a …
Here’s a half-formed thought for translation people. It probably gradually dawns on us all that the way the English Bible normally uses ‘word’ is not the usual way that we use it in English. It’s generally used as a translation for λογος or ρημα or אֹמֶר or דָּבָר. The problem is that the most common …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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? …
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 …