New songs about a new road at Koi Nili, “the place where they sing.”

The concluding part 8 in the continuing short history of the Goiniri Onnele people of Papua New Guinea as reported to me last week by Dominic Pusai…

Now that the road is going in up there to Koi Nili, the Goiniri could move back to their roots within the next few years. At the same time the Goiniri, Wolwale, and Romei-Barera Bible translators are starting to think about taking the Bible translation movement into the mountains. There are many other Onnele language groups that still live in remote areas and have no access to the Word of God in their own languages.

These translators became a part of the Aitape West Translation Project in 2001 after a tsunami forced the Arop people to relocate further inland and the Arop translation team found themselves centrally located between 10 other language groups in the region. They were asking for Bible translation, and they couldn’t be denied. If the Goiniri people move back to Old Goiniri, or Koi Nili – “the place where they sing” — this could be another central area where the Bible translation movement could clearly mark out a new road for many other groups in the Onnele family of languages.

And once again they’ll hear others singing at Koi Nili. But these will be new songs about a new road from the Word of God, and in their own languages.

Not waiting to see Jesus, I hope

This blog post title can be read in two completely different ways.

1. You could read it with a hopeless and disparaging tone, and perhaps that will get me some blog readers who are curious and ready to bring me into line. As such, the part before the comma has focus and the “I hope” really has the commonly used sense of “I doubt, but for your sake it would be good if you wise up”
2. If you want to get my real meaning, you should read it as a statement with the part before the comma only providing an adverbial restriction to the focus of the statement, “I hope.” This is true wisdom that only comes from above.

Obviously, language can sometimes be really ambiguous. And in Bible translation, often times we need to look closely at the words we use and make sure we’re conveying the right meaning and not some other meaning that can creep in either because of the way that words have multiple senses or because of some lack of understanding on our part about what the original text means.

We have an example of this with the word “hope” in 1 Timothy 1:1. Read on to get an idea of the kind of translation note I am writing these days for my teammates. 

Co-laboring together: collaboration on translation notes with Paratext 7.1

I last posted here about our translation team testing a BGAN satellite terminal to share our translation notes back and forth between our remote village and the outside world.

UPDATE: I asked you to pray that…

• I can delete the old projects successfully
  • It took me until the wee hours of the morning, but I was able to delete the 63 old projects that were in my name.
• we figure out how to keep this from happening again
  • Thankfully, the network administrator was also able to help us delete over 1000 old projects from his end. This is a good thing! That means we shouldn’t have these old projects reappearing if one of the 20+ members of our team forgets to delete them and accidentally puts them on the server again.
• John will be able to use the BGAN to receive the new notes
  • Yes! It is working, and John and I have sent our translation data back and forth a few times already. This is the first time in the history of our project that we have been able to send this amount of data back and forth this easily and within the same day that we are working on the translation in different parts of the world.

In the Aitape West Translation Project we are using the newest version of translation software (Paratext 7.1) developed by the United Bible Societies. We have been helping them test the alpha and beta versions of this software in our multi-language context for the last two years. Last week I was using it to write translation notes on 1 Timothy which I sent to the Arop team in the village as they are preparing their translation to become the immediate source text for the other ten languages to translate later in the year. This week I’m using Paratext to write translation notes on Luke which I’m sending to the three Onnele teams as they make final edits and clean up their translations for publication in the next few months. Here’s how it works…