Monday, February 29, 2016

Counting in The Jungle

Let's check out Matthew 16:10.


Or the 4,000 I fed with seven loaves, and the large baskets of leftovers you picked up?

Per usual, the disciples have said something dumb and Jesus is calling them out on it. This time, when Jesus was trying to make a point, they were going on about how they forgot to bring bread, and Jesus was all, hello! Haven't I proven that I can manage lunch? Remember that one time...? and that other time.... ?
This verse is in reference to that other time. 


Ok so after I ask my endless list of questions, I ask a final question:
Do you see anything that you want to change to make this more clear, accurate, or natural?

And there was!
While the Tok Ples (language of the of village) was accurate and clear in communicating how many loaves Jesus started with, it wasn't sweet

Did you know?
Many languages that developed in small communities
had little to no reason to count higher than their fingers.
As a result, their words for numbers revolve around their fingers
and less around "numbers" as we think of them. 

The current translation read "two and two and two and one", which of course together is 7. But it was a little long... 
The suggested change was for "one hand and two". After a bit of discussion to see if it worked, this was deemed natural and concise. 
This is how they would say it. 
This was sweet

Sunday, February 28, 2016

What were the raised saints up to for three days?

After writing about Duh Questions, I thought it appropriate to start the anecdotes with a classic Duh Question saves the day story.

Let's check out Matthew 27:52-53.

(context from the CEV) 50 Once again Jesus shouted, and then he died.
51 At once the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, and rocks split apart. 


The tombs opened and, many people of God who had been dead for a while, they got up. They left the tomb, and when Jesus rose again, and they went inside holy city of Jerusalem and plenty people saw them. (The English translation of the Tok Pisin translation of the Tok Ples translation. Something that should really never be done.)



So while in v. 52, I looked up at the group around me. There were 15-20 men inside the hauswin (pavilion) and a whole crowd outside, against the hauswin, sitting beside it. People were everywhere. It did not help the breeze. We had read through the passage as a whole and they answered some questions on the main point and theme and now we were going verse by verse, having them translate it into Tok Pisin and then answer some questions about it.

"I'm going to ask you a question," I said. "And you're going to think: why are you asking this question? But I'm not trying to trick you. I just need to ask this question before I ask a question I have later."
And then I said it.
"When did the people raise to life?"
Silence.
Of course.
Always silence with a Duh Question.
But finally one of the most outspoken attendees said, "When Jesus' spirit left him."
"Ok. v. 53."
(You're not supposed to affirm answers because you're not supposed to ever say that they're wrong, since that will shame them into not answering more questions, when really a wrong answer is most often a problem with the translation communicating well. But since you can't say they're wrong, you can't say they're right or when you don't say they're right, you confirm that they're wrong, right? Ok!)

They began to read v. 53 in Tok Ples (language of the village). And they weren't very far in when the "ooooh's" started. I didn't even need to ask my next question. Prepped by my Duh Question, they could see the confusing part themselves.

When did the people leave the tomb?
Where were the people before Jesus resurrected?

There was a lot of talking in Tok Ples (which I can't understand). I was asked for clarification.
The more Tok Ples discussion.
Finally, the head translator told me it was fixed.

They moved the "and when Jesus rose again" to the beginning of v 53. Which is what the CEV does!


52 Graves opened, and many of God’s people were raised to life. 53 Then after Jesus had risen to life, they came out of their graves and went into the holy city, where they were seen by many people.






Comprehension Checking and Duh Questions

So I wrote an article about prepping for comprehension checking but now, with a little experience, I can speak to the execution of the comprehension checking (which was way more interesting than the prep!)

I was a part of a bible study in high school where we would go through a list of questions provided by our Student Minister. There were a couple of questions, especially at the beginning of each night, that would be met with silence. No one would answer. Finally, KT, our leader, would remind us it was a Duh Question.
You see, Duh Questions are those questions whose answers are so obvious that you feel stupid for answering and so you don't. It can be mentally processed in a couple ways.
  • This answer can't be this obvious, so I must be missing something.
  • This is a trick question.
  • Clearly, the questioner thinks I'm stupid. Why else would she ask an obvious question? I'm not playing.
  • The questioner must be stupid if she doesn't know the answer to this question.
But by calling the question a Duh Question, KT communicated that this question was merely foundational. i.e. If the hit-it-home application question was based on the premise that Jesus loves you, you first have to establish that everyone you're speaking to believes Jesus loves them.
When we heard that, we were put at ease. All our fears were allayed and we were able to answer the question and move on. (Not that James liked his questions being referred to as Duh Questions.)

Here's the thing about Duh Questions: If there's nothing wrong, it seems like a stupid question. If there is something wrong, it's a ridiculously super important question. And the only way you can tell is by asking.

My job in checking was to ask approximately a billion Duh Questions. And the, by far, worse questions, that I will dub: IDK Questions. i.e. "What did Herodias and her daughter do with the head of John the Baptist after it was brought to them on a silver platter?"  If the answer is, "I don't know!", awesome! If it's "they ate it", that would be bad. Again, if nothing's wrong, it's a stupid question. How should you know what they did? But if something is wrong, it's a ridiculously super important question.

The goal in checking is to find the problem spots and fix them. So the way I knew I did a good job what when I asked a question and they started talking, maybe ask me some questions, and then fall into Tok Ples (literally "Language of the Village"). I would sit and twiddle my thumbs and then they would make a change and tell me it was good and we would move on. Super glamorous, right?
(When we allocate, step one is to learn Tok Ples and then I won't be left out of the Tok Ples discussions!)

But it was awesome! There were changes made, some silly mistakes, some cultural things, some lack of clarity. There were a lot of notes made, that I left for a more experienced translator to handle in April, during the Consultant Check (the final step in translation before they'll be printing the book of Matthew.) There were a lot of lessons learned on both sides of the table.

(I haven't gotten around to writing all of these yet…. Stay Tuned!)

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Overview of our trip to the village

Overviews are the worst.
It's like, "inform me, entertain me, and most importantly, keep a synopsis of four days in the village brief."
It's kind of a tall order. But I aim to please.

I'm pretty sure we were sunburned before we left the hangar. We went out to load the helicopter (they let us take 400kg! Which was exactly the weight of everything we brought with us!) but we just sat there, during an overcast day, waiting for the helicopter to fuel. Then we unloaded in the middle of a field, and then we were greeted. The greeting was short, compared to others I've been privy to in this country but all of this was done under an overcast sky. How deceptive those clouds are.

My first great cultural victory was persuading the translators to let us have a checking session on that first day. They waved it off initially because all the people worth having in the checking session were in their gardens still. But in a quiet voice without (seemingly confrontationally) looking into the eyes of the men, I explained that I had not done a checking session before and it would be better for me to practice with the women and those around before I sat down with the bikmen, or prestigious men, of the area. This was very pleasing to them and we checked Matthew 26:1-13 day 1.

Day 2, we hiked out to the second village, the village we were thinking of allocating to. I managed the hike well with only two mountains to trek before reaching the village. They said it took them 45 minutes and, upon hearing that, the veteran missionaries told me to expect 2-3 hours. I made it in 1.5hrs! At some point grit and friction rubbed a bit of my toe raw, but I didn't think badly enough to break the skin. Apparently I was wrong and spent the rest of the trip with infection. Luckily, the helicopter was planning on picking us up in the second village and we wouldn't have to hike back.

We arrived 10:30 in the morning, and while they traditionally beat a hollowed hunk of strong wood to beckon those far and wide to come, they didn't have one at this hamlet, so blew through a conch seashell. It resounded through the rainforest letting all the people group know it was time to start the checking session. Man, I wish I had thought to snap a photo of that!

This story sheet was given to the Mum translators upon their completion of the Back Translation Course in 2010, which I helped with as an intern on my first visit to PNG. 

The first day we checked 56 vs in Matthew 26 in 5 hours with plenty of breaks. The group was representative of all the dialects of this language group, meaning some people had trekked quite a distance to join this session.
The mountain ridge on the horizon is a 4 hour hike (for a national). I know because several people from a village there hiked to attend this checking session. 

The next day, the focus was emphasized, the routine was found, and the commitment to finishing was strong. We finished checking Matthew 26, and 27, 28 (105 vs). At 10 pm, after 12 hours of checking, I pointed out that they were falling asleep and that wasn't good for checking. We should stop for the night and we could start again tomorrow morning.

I went straight to bed, joining my husband who tucked in hours before after a long day of hiking to see every hamlet in the village.
Going from sleeping on a 6" foam mattress with four pillows to a wooden surface with a 1/2" foam mattress and a single pillow (while still pregnant) wasn't a very comfortable transition. I woke up many times during the night, giving me the awareness to say, those men stayed up until 2 am talking with their wives about the checking session.

At 4:30 am the next morning, I got out of bed, hoping someone would be around to boil some water for coffee. But the place was uncharacteristically quiet. (They go to bed at 11ish and wake up at 4ish, and laugh at us for sleeping 8 hours.) Finally, at 6, I wondered if maybe they were waiting on me, so I walked over to the pavilion and a man jumped up as he saw me arrive. But not to greet me. To run inside and wake all the men who had slept in there instead of hiking back to their homes.
I walked back to our house (a trade store, emptied for our use, featuring a veranda and one room with a platform for me to sleep on, so high I could barely hop on it!), giving them some time to wake up.

At 6:30, we started checking. They sent out for a young girl to get Jacob and me some hot water for our coffee, and we tucked into the translation. Taking a 10 minute break at the end of chapter 14 and 15, we worked with an ear to the sky, having no idea when the helicopter would come. We were working on checking the last vs of chapter 16 when they told me the helicopter was coming. (Their hearing is way better than ours.)

During the time we were there, they had cleared off a space for the helicopter to land (cutting grass, felling trees, clearing brush), and so were on the landing strip with red cloth to flag the helicopter down. The helicopter flew over twice before we finally convinced them that he saw them but couldn't land while they were standing on landing spot.
And so ended our visit to the first language group on the table.

We really really loved the second village we went to. Jacob had hiked around and saw it all and it's a beautiful place. We love the people. But the layout of the village (in distant hamlets instead of in a centralized village area) isn't ideal for language learning, community, or incarnational ministry. Really, there wouldn't be much difference between living in a hamlet and living in town, (except that people would more easily be able to join us for translation work). But as far as mourning with them and celebrating with them, there's a lot of distance between any two points in the village. The first village isn't off the table, per se, but we didn't really get a chance to check out that village as we were so focused on this village.

NEXT STEPS:
Go check out the second language group. See if we get a firm yes or no from them. If we get a yes, then it's decided. If we get a no, then I think we'd like to consider other options WHILE allocating to this first village for a month to get some translation work done there. So even while the very slow process of survey work is happening, we're serving a current Group Directed Project, and getting a better feel for this language group who we've really liked personality-wise. We can then decide to work with them or pursue another option that will hopefully surface during survey.

Either way, more translation teams are coming and survey needs to be done. None of this work would be wasted.  

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Done! ...ish (Packing for a Helicopter)


There's really always an -ish at the end of done here in PNG.
We've spent most of the week in final preparations for our trip out to the bush.
But what does that mean?

When (if) you get your helicopter confirmed, you get a weight allowance.
Ours was 360-385kgs.
Then you gather and weigh yourselves and your cargo.

We weighed all four of the people flying and marked down those numbers. Then we gathered up all our bags and weighed them individually. Every single one. If it was a unique bag it could just get a description and it's weight. If it was a random box, it needed a number, it's content, and the weight.


Everything needs to be marked by priority. So if they say, "well, actually you only get 350kgs" we can cut the least important things without undue stress.
We always bring more than enough, so that if they say, "You have 400kgs", we can fill that birdie up!
(Because we're paying for the helicopter either way!)

So we weighed ourselves and our cargo and found ourselves over 360kg with things that COULD NOT BE CUT. (clothes, food, diapers, personal body fat, etc) So then we had to go through everything again. Do we need a full jar of peanut butter or can we scoop some out? How many boxes of crayons do we really need? We have dehydrated meals in jars but maybe we could find one plastic jar and use sandwich baggies... Instead of bringing coffee and sugar and milk, maybe we can bring a serving to dump in a french press for each morning. No extra. Instead of two mosquito nets, maybe James can fit under ours...
Considering we're hiking in to another village from our helicopter landing point, cutting out ounces at a time is fairly reasonable.



We spent Wednesday compiling most things. Thursday, everything. Thursday we went shopping for the non-essential cargo. Rice and tin-fish and ramen noodles to provide our translators with during this time of famine here in PNG. Thursday night, we took home the bags and did the oz cutting game. Friday morning, we re-weighed everything and crunched the numbers and finally found ourselves at a good weight.


So once you're at the mark with essentials and busting over with non-essentials ranked by priority, you're done! ...ish.

We could use a gift for our host family and for the people who carry our cargo into the other village (because that is not happening on this pregnant woman and her husband's back!) So we need to go pick that up... We're thinking about phone credit cards, which can be hard to get out in the village but are slips of paper so weigh nothing.
I'm sure there'll be a last minute thought or two but that's the way it always is!

Monday morning at 10 am, we'll be out at the hangar, waiting for our 10:45 pick-up. They could be early. They could be very very late. We live in PNG and there's really no telling. Our cargo comes in and what gets loaded, gets loaded, and the rest goes back into town.

And then we're off!!

Monday, February 1, 2016

Preparations for Comprehension Checking

Look! I AM actually doing work! It's just not very exciting right now. 

The following is to inform more than entertain, though I promise to strive to be as entertaining as possible.
We've been sent out to the jungle by you (assuming that you're a financial partner, I think some, most? All? I have no idea who reads this blog… There's not a lot of feedback I receive… It's like typing into a void… …. …….) to do a job. And so far you've heard that we've finished POC (YAY!), a bit about next steps, and that our lives have been full of medical visa chaos for the sake of leaving the country we just arrived in to deliver a baby. Now I will admit that this baby is less essential to our successful ministry than the first baby. (In this culture, you're not a full-fledged adult unless you have a child, and we needed to be peers with the adults of the village to minister to the best of our ability.) However, I think that growing ones family at a facility equipped to handle nearly any complication is a reasonable enough reason to work long distance for a few months. But more about that assignment later…

NOW I'm going to tantalize/traumatize you with the details of what I'm working on now as good evidence that in the midst of medical visa chaos, I am doing work remarkably similar to the work I said I would be doing (but not the same because that can't happen until we allocate)!!

So Language Group #1 is pretty close to spitting out Matthew in published print! But so was this other language group to printing their whole NT when they realized that the final draft was a bit more like a rough draft than the final draft ought to be. Turns out, they never did a naturalness check!!
Gah!!!
We have, like, a million different checks that translations need to go through. And it's not because we find some sick pleasure in watching teams jump through hoops of fire. It's because when we finally get done and spend a TON of money on printing, we don't want to pass out Scripture and hear, "I'm not going to read this! It hurts my ears! This butchery of my language."
So we looked at this language group and then looked back over our shoulders at Language Group #1 and thought, "Hmmm, maybe we'd better…." So we're doing a village check!

Now the reason we're going out is so we can see a potential allocation.
But the village check is extremely important and needs to get done.
But not at the cost of us getting a feel for the place.
But the people I'd work with and how they work together and with me is half the feel.
But I need to find friends and people I like and get to know people.
But this is really important work, too.

Ok, whatever. We'll put the balancing game in the dexterous hands of the Lord and proceed with preparing for a village checking session.

Ok, so we're trying to ask questions to accomplish a couple different goals. We want everything to sound natural. We want everything to be clear. And we want everything to be correct.
So if I say, "Jesus got on the boat and went across the lake." That needs to be a natural sounding sentence (meh, more or less, a little abrupt but let's assume there's more context and roll with it), it needs to be clear (yep, I think you would have to try to misunderstand something in that sentence), and it needs to be correct (whoops! It was actually his disciples! He went on the mountainside to pray.)
So we have to ask questions about EVERYTHING. Every little.tiny.thing. 

Ok so we pick out 9 chapters to check.
Now, like a very good little Master's student, I wrote out all the questions. ALL the questions. ALL of the questions for EVERY little.tiny.thing. 
I had 22 pages of questions for not even three chapters of Matthew. And I hated my life.
So I scrapped that (a week of labor!) and did this instead!! (Worth it!)


("oooo" "ahhh" "Pretty!" "How aesthetically pleasing!") (Click to make it larger)
Ok so!
  • First I ask a theme question, like "What's the main point of this passage?" or, like illustrated above, "What did Jesus' disciples learn in this story?"
  • Then I ask an overview question. "What happened in this story?" and as they go over it, I'll put a check mark over each bit of highlighted/colored text as they mention it. Then if they missed something, I can ask about it specifically (which would be considered a detail question), just to make sure that they only didn't mention it and not that they didn't understand it.
  • Meanwhile! I'll ask detail questions (sometimes the highlighting doesn't do the question justice, so I wrote it in the spreadsheet) and implication questions.
    Implication questions ask about things that we (correctly) assume when we read the text (and so did the original audience) and we want to make sure that understanding is passed on. The last implication question above says, "Why did Jesus forbid the disciples [from saying that he was the Messiah]?" We'd want an answer like, "It wasn't time for everybody to know" or "if the Pharisees heard that, they'd try to kill Jesus before his time had come" or "the people might try to make him king again". But if we got an answer like, "this information is the secret to getting cargo and you have to keep it a secret otherwise it will lose its cargo getting powers" (which honestly could be a perceived meaning in Papuan culture…) we would need to deal with that. 
  • Finally I ask about the text itself (those questions are kept on a bookmark of sorts, not illustrated here, because they really apply to every text). "What kind of text is this? Narrative? Sermon? Letter? Prophecy?" "Who wrote it?" "Do they have a mastery language?" Here we're trying to make sure that The Sermon on the Mount doesn't read like a fairy tale a woman is telling to a child, because no one is going to take that seriously. And I, also, ask about revision ideas. "How could this sound more natural?" "Was there something that was a little confusing that we could make better?"

So I'm nearly finished writing all my questions for Matthew 14-16 and I'm done with Matthew 26-28 and the Director of Language Affairs, who's accompanying us on this venture, is doing 5-7. (Things started going MUCH faster when I stopped doing things "the proper" way.) And then hopefully, we'll be taking it to the village next week. 

MAIN IDEA!!! READ THIS!!! IF YOU SKIP ALL THE OTHER THINGS READ THIS!!!!!!
Ok.
Translation is boring. Except for me and people like me and even sometimes for me and people like me. You may have heard some excellent stories from translators, but those are the highlights. The BULK of it is boring. Boooooooring.
Transformed lives is amazing. You may have heard an awesome tale about a language blooper that was caught in a checking session, but if you've heard a story of life change happening through the Scriptures being presented in someone's heart language for the first time, you'll probably realize the word "awesome" was underappreciated in your usage.
Transformed lives is our goal. Transformed lives is why you funded us and sent us. And translation (which is way less boring than what Jacob's working on right now!) is just a tool to that end.
Transformed lives is what we need to be praying for. Yes, yes, please pray that our travel is graced by the ill-defined "traveling mercies" and that our checking progress is stellar. And please please pray that we have a clear yes or no from God about working with this people group long term, but please please, please please pray that through this God would transform lives. That when we present this Scripture, mostly likely for the first time in their own language, that it touch their souls in an irreparable way.  

Learn about the Second Language Group on the Table


This language group came to Pioneer Bible Translators, informing us that they need a Bible in their own language. Our response to them back in 2006 was, "Sorry, we don't have any translators to send to you." That did not deter this language group. They committed to working on it themselves.
For 10 years, they've worked diligently themselves to get for themselves the Scriptures.

We work with 2 related languages, both of which have a completed New Testament and one of which  with significantly more translated as well. To help this language, we've tried to adapt a translation of one of their related languages into their language. So, grossly simplified, we took a completed New Testament, ran it through a computer program, and it made a translation for this language. The translation was awful. It was a failed project. The good old fashion way would have to be tried instead.
Unfortunately, the progress has been slow without a translator allocated there.
Mark and Acts have been published with other gospels at varying (final-ish) stages of the translation process.

There are about 800 speakers in a small area kind of by the coast and the Ramu River.

While we would love to start a brand new project (our level of pioneer spirit goes all the way back to developing an alphabet), there's a lot to be said for a language group that's proven their committedness to a project independently of a missionary.

This language group has never had a missionary allocate there before. This can be really great in that there are no preconceived notions about how we will live/interact/etc based on the lives/habits/tendencies of our predecessors, but difficult in that boundaries haven't yet been established.

We will hopefully be taking a trip out to this language group after our return from Australia.
This will either be a helicopter trip or... there is a road to the language territory but not directly into the village where the primary translators live.
It's important to take a trip out to where we would want to live to get a feel for that place. By this I mean, not driving in, because it's easier and cheaper, to a different area, only to decide to allocate to the village of the primary translators and discovering there's no nearby water source, or people habitually get dangerously inebriated and fight amongst themselves all night long. While these people too would need Jesus, our safety and feeling of safety would significantly increase our longevity on the field. At very least, we need to have some idea of what we're walking into before getting dropped off for three months.

The other language group on the table has information posted.
We don't want to have a hard choice to make. Please pray that the Lord guide us and the people He wants us to work with is exceedingly obvious.