Journeyman

I had a few successes today. The first was that I made it into the morning worship session before it started. That’s not been the case for the last few days.

The second success was that there was a part of the WoW course that I felt I could fully engage with.

The morning sessions still involved looking at translations. We were trying to work through another language and make sense out of a literal translation. Again, there were some folk in the group that found this really interesting and engaging while I was thinking mostly about the next coffee break.

But, we also had a couple of sessions on cultural differences. As a bloke who, in the past, has tried to shake hands with a very Muslim woman in the presence of her husband, I know a bit about the mistakes that are possible when working with people of different cultures. What this, and other similar mistakes, have taught me, is to smile, apologise if appropriate and keep going. Hopefully the worst you are going to do is convince others that you’re a complete idiot, mostly I get laughed at.

At the end of today I was thinking more about the cultural mistakes we make as Christians in a western culture. There are elements of my Christian sub-culture that kick against the cultural norms in the UK. While, there are still other aspects that oppose perceived cultural norms. In other words, what may be indicated in the media as normal in this society does not match an individuals cultural expectations.

Anyway, I really engaged with the cultural stuff, I just find the ‘words bit’ slightly difficult.

At this point it’s probably worth referring back to a post I wrote a few days ago called Learning about Wycliffe. I cited one of the comments from this post in what I wrote yesterday, claiming that only 1/3 of Wycliffe staff are involved in Bible translation. Anyway, Mark left the following comment in response…

Hmmmm… I’m not sure about those proportions. If we’re talking about expatriate missionaries, hardly any are “doing Bible translation”. Some are involved in translation checking, others in linguistics, literacy work, language assessment etc, and others in project managing, IT and computing, member care etc.

I wouldn’t want to make a distinction between those “doing Bible translation” and those supporting the work. All expatriates are supporting Bible translation which is being done by the local community – some more directly involved in the language work and others less so.

I think there are a few communication issues here caused by my not using the correct terminology. I would expect that a lot of what I would call ‘translation work’ wouldn’t fit into the official definition of translation. I think that I’d still say that anyone working on generating a new written language, whether it’s writing down the words people say using the phonetic alphabet, or if it’s developing the rules for the language system, they are all involved in some area of translation. I get the impression that the field is actually quite huge and that others would be more precise in saying that one thing is translation while another bit is something completely different. Anyway, clearly I’m going to have to start digging into some of the stats when I get back to the office. If we can say with some level of certainty how many languages still require translation we can probably also say how many people associated with Wycliffe UK are working in language or support roles. I’ll keep you posted when I find something out. Or if you can give some direction I’d love to learn from you, please feel free to comment here.

Right now, I’m done for the day. I think I’ll watch one last West Wing episode before bed. Night all.