Bible translation work can be fascinating but also frustrating. It’s easy to get irritated with one another especially if you are convinced that your translation of a verse is much better than your colleague’s and you can’t agree!
Author: Sue
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Jesus is Not My Dead Ancestor
You can’t just look in a commentary to find the solutions to some of the problems that Bible translators face: what Sue got up to in Madagascar.
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Salted By Fire
Bible translators don’t just have to work out what tricky passages mean, they also have to find a way to express them clearly and accurate in another language. So what does ‘salted by fire’ mean and what is the best way to say it?
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A song from Madagascar
This afternoon I heard that this song had been uploaded onto YouTube today. It was written by Edit, who helps with admin on the project I’m involved with in Madagascar. He is the guy in the hat, singing and playing guitar. The song is called ‘Jesosy raiky avao’ (‘Only Jesus’). I really like the song […]
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The Queen’s English?
The Guardian has a fascinating article on the way English is spoken in Ghana. It seems that there is a debate going on in Ghana between those who believe that Ghanaians should speak ‘the Queen’s English’ trying to mimic so-called ‘received pronunciation’, because they think that sounding English is prestigious, and those who value being multilingual […]
Some vignettes from the Kouya New Testament dedication ceremony.
Yesterday I arrived home from a visit to Ivory Coast to attend the dedication of the New Testament in Kouya. It took place in the village of Dema, which is where we first lived when we moved to the Kouya area almost 25 years ago. In a number of ways this wasn’t a typical dedication. […]
In a BBC article entitled ‘Viewpoint: Ivory Coast’s lesson to Nigeria’, Nigerian-born novelist and journalist Kingsley Kobo reflects on the situation in Ivory Coast and takes a look at what Nigerians can learn from it for their own Presidential Elections. Kobo is well-placed to comment as he has spent the last 16 years living in […]
In this year of celebrating 400 years of the King James Bible, here is an interesting article in today’s Guardian. A number of writers (including Alexander McCall Smith and linguist David Crystal) talk about their experience of the KJV’s language in 6 short pieces. Below are a couple of extracts from novelist Janine Winterson’s article: […]
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Don’t forget Ivory Coast!
Ivory Coast’s political crisis seems to be forgotten as the world’s attention has been grabbed by events in Tunisia, then Egypt and now Bahrain. (Not that the mainstream UK media include much news from Francophone countries at the best of times!) This Reuters article reports on the situation as financial chaos is added to economic […]