On the wall above my desk I have a couple of handwritten posters to give me a little extra motivation when I need it. One reminds me of the work that Wycliffe still has to do.

• 2,393 languages needing a Bible translation
• 200 million people without a Bible in their own language.

In a recent survey conducted for us, someone commented that the aim to translate the Bible into 2000 more languages when some of those language groups may be very small is a bit unrealistic.

It’s a fair question. How do we determine who needs a Bible translation?

Before a translation project starts we do survey work. The survey process is to answer questions like,

• how many people speak the language?
• is it a growing or dying language?
• are there strong regional accents, or regional words?
• is the language used in just one location or in different areas?
• has language changed between generations?

and, ultimately,

• is this a community that would benefit from a Bible translation?

For a long time Wycliffe were getting closer and closer to the point of having more translation projects completed than still needed to be done. However, survey work managed to find more language groups needing translations, so the work to do kept on going up.

Now we think we have a reasonably good idea that there are 2,393 languages that still need a Bible translation. That’s not to say that we won’t still find a few more that need work, but hopefully the number won’t shoot up too much more.

If you’d like to find out more about language survey work, you could do worse than reading Hazel Gray’s blog, From Mathematics to Linguistics. Her most recent post on language survey work throws up some of the more interesting situations she finds herself in.

During this village meeting we had 2 curious incidents. The first was an experience of village politics as we sat around waiting for the mtendaji to arrive. As far as I can gather, a woman had been travelling on a daladala (public transport) for a few days, and had not yet paid, so the ticket collector guy took her kitenge (rectangle of fabric usually worn by women as an extra wrapping around head/whole body/as a skirt) until she could pay up. When she came to pay and collect her kitenge, she found that the kitenge had been ripped, so we got to listen to the argument between her and the ticket collector, in front of the village leader, as to who should pay or not… [Read more here]

Oh, and just while I think of it. Is 1,000 people too small a language group to do translation for? I hope not. Personally, if there were a group of 50 that needed a translation and it didn’t look as though that language would die in the near future, I’d hope that we’d be willing to work on it.