Ronny's Discovery part2

Another thing that surprised me about the trip was how useful I got to be. I wanted to be able to help the missionaries, but I wasn't sure how much use an untrained non-speaker would be to a language project. 

The Avatime language project began in November of 2005. Although a few people had written sporadic papers on the language, no one had done a comprehensive study on the grammar. After the project leader, Mr. Mununkum, completed the study and did other preliminary steps, the translation team was given the go-ahead by GILLBT to begin translating Mark at the beginning of this year.

Currently, they are editing their translation of Mark and have rough drafts for Matthew, 2 Thessalonians, and the beginning of Luke. This is where my partner Dorcas and I came in: they needed to type the drafts. We took turns typing on Mr. Mununkum’s laptop, working from triple-spaced handwritten drafts.

I was in awe that I was allowed to do this. I thought of the scribes of long ago who spent hours praying and studying, who would burn a whole scroll because of a single mistake, who worked and worked to keep each copy of Scripture accurate in an attempt to prevent inconsistencies that would have come up had they been careless.

The pressure on me wasn't nearly the same. When I hit the wrong key or accidentally skipped a verse, a simple backstroke corrected the problem. If mistakes did get through, many, many more people will be poring over the text before it gets anywhere near a printing press. Still, I got to continue in a tradition stretching back hundreds and hundreds of years: copying Scripture accurately with the goal of making God’s Word available to more people.

John Wycliffe, for whom Wycliffe Bible Translators is named, was imprisoned and eventually killed for working to translate the Bible into English. The church officials at the time said that the Bible shouldn’t be in a commoner’s language, that God’s Word was too important to be translated, and that only priests should be given access to Scripture.

Since they were that upset about a respected, middle-aged man who worked in the ministry translating the Bible into the language of their countrymen, I think that they would be none too happy to know that I – a 21-year-old girl who just loves people and languages – was sitting, working on typing Scripture for a previously unwritten language with maybe 5,000 speakers. Somehow, I think that’s the kind of situation that they wanted to avoid when they orchestrated Wycliffe’s death.

With that kind of history behind me – the history of transcribing and translating – I could feel the honor of the task given to me and Dorcas. In addition to that, the assignment was also of practical value. The translation team is largely comprised of retired men who have spent most of their lives in the villages. They know how to use computers, but their life experiences haven’t given them quite the typing skills that many late nights of writing papers due the next morning have given me. Dorcas and I saved them many hours of labor that could be used in other translation activities – activities for which I was wholly unqualified.

(look for the concluding part3 next week)