Goiniri Onnele history: Dominic out of jail

Dominic reports on Wolwale Scripture dedication

For the last several years that I have been living in Papua New Guinea, Dominic has told me that he faces constant threats from the family of a man that was killed ten years ago in a self-defense struggle. He says, “If God hadn’t called me to translate the Bible for my people, then I would run away and hide from those who threaten to kill me.” Five weeks ago, they attacked Dominic in town and put a five-inch gash in his upper arm with a large bush knife. When he reported it to the police, they held him in jail, partly for his own protection, partly to determine if his case would become a murder trial in national court.

I spoke with the police lieutenant four weeks ago, and he was very interested in hearing of Dominic’s role as a new leader in the translation project. He said, “Ben, I know that the Word of the Lord changes people, and that makes my job much easier.” He assured me that he was interested in Dominic’s safety and the continued translation of God’s Word into the many languages of his district.

Dominic was released from jail just over two weeks ago. With no eyewitnesses, the police released him after negotiating an out-of-court settlement between the two parties. Dominic owes compensation of 15,000 kina (close to $7,000), but the two groups shook hands, signed an offical statutory declaration with the police, and the opposing family confirmed that Dominic’s life is no longer in danger of retaliation. They said he should feel free to walk around and do his work, and they will not seek revenge or threaten him.

Dominic spent the last few weeks at our translation workshop, making an audio recording of the Goiniri Onnele translation of Luke and entering final corrections into the draft of Acts. For the next seven days, I will post here a brief history of Dominic’s Goiniri Onnele people as reported to me by him last week.

Oops! They were not tired of God.

When the Onnele translators were checking over their translation of Acts 2:5 in September, they had to think twice about what the word “numne” meant in this context. Why? Well, because I asked them to.

I know that “numne” can be used with different senses, and sometimes the context doesn’t make it clear. It can mean “to fear” or “to respect,” which is what we were hoping for in this verse. The NASB reads here:

Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven.

It was the translation of the meaning for the word “devout” that we were checking here. The idea of “fear” or “respect” has been used in some translations to express the sense here. The NIV reads:

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

So at first glance it seemed that the Onnele Goiniri use of “numne” in their translation was alright:

Empo taim namo, nu Juda fai numne God sa nainene taunwamo Jerusalem. Nu uma namo, empo noloni kantri wongkwongkeni.
At this time, Jews who feared God were staying in the city of Jerusalem. These people came from all different countries.

But when I asked the translators what this verse meant in their language — does this refer to Jews who feared God or were tired of him? — they paused, smiled, and simply said, “yes.” It could mean either one, and it really wasn’t clear. It was so unclear that they had to ask me, “Which one is it supposed to mean here?”

So after they compared different English and Pidgin versions, they adjusted their translation so that it reads:

Empo taim namo, nu Juda fai nosinanene God sa nainene Jerusalem. Nu uma namo, empo noloni kantri wongkwongkeni.
At this time, Jews who gave worship to God were staying in Jerusalem. These people came from all different countries.

Okay, now it was clear.

Please pray for the translators of the Aitape West Translation Project. They are meeting again this month to revise their translations of Acts and prepare them for consultant checking next year. Jonathan and Dominic (left and middle pictured above) are the only Onnele translators to arrive for this first week of the workshop.

We only know why Joel is absent: his brother Andrew is deathly sick in town with both malaria and a very bad strain of TB. Please pray for Andrew.

We have no way of knowing why other translators have not arrived yet. Pray that they will continue to numne God, and I don’t mean that they would be tired of him. No, that they would nosinanene him and continue to translate God’s Word so that many others may give worship to him in Spirit and in truth, and in their own language.

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…

Let’s share translation notes with a BGAN satellite terminal

Although our family had to stay at our national training center, our teammates John, Beth, and Jessie still went out to Arop village, and they are meeting with a smaller number of translators since we were not yet able to get a new septic tank installed to accommodate the whole group. That means that as I check over 1 Timothy, I also get to help John test a new method of sharing translation data between Arop village and the outside world.

Loren and John troubleshooting the BGAN connection last July

Yesterday, I finished writing up about 35 notes for 1 Timothy chapter 1. I sent an email to John in the village letting him know that I sent those notes to an internet server managed by the United Bible Societies. He can get that email over a high frequency radio connection, but he can’t get the translation data over that slow connection. So he’ll be testing a new piece of equipment called a BGAN to connect to the internet and receive the data. BGAN stands for Broadband Global Area Network. It’s a satellite internet terminal about the size of a laptop. At about $6.50 per MB, we won’t be using this to surf the web.

Make it right, once for all, not eleven times

Pastor Peter and Emil, Arop translators

What I’m getting at here is accuracy in Bible translation. It’s about finding “opportunities for improvement” (as our teammate John Nystrom likes to say), and making suggestions for really getting the translation right. When you’re working with eleven language teams translating the same passages together, it’s really nice when we can work together in such a way as to reduce our workload.

This week I’m checking the Arop translation of 1 Timothy. The Arop translators drafted this several years ago. They revised it in 2009, and now I have the last opportunity to suggest changes to it before it becomes the immediate

Happiness, joy, or a good liver?

What’s the difference between joy and happiness? Well, it really depends on how you use the words. Some insist on a fundamental difference between these concepts rooted in the idea that we often base our happiness on happenings, while we can have a true inner joy despite what’s happening to us or around us: joy in the midst of suffering. I read Tim Hansel’s You Gotta Keep Dancin’ many years ago. Writing from the perspective of suffering with chronic pain after a climbing accident in the Sierras, he instructs us that we can choose to be joyful with God’s help no matter what our circumstances. It’s an awesome truth.

On the other hand, someone might use the word ‘happy’ in the same way if their happiness is not always based on their immediate circumstances. The way we actually use words is the biggest factor in determining their meaning.

In the Onnele languages, there are also different ways to express concepts such as joy and happiness, and different Onnele dialects may use one expression more commonly than another.

When we were checking over Luke 1:14 last week, we struggled with different ways to appropriately express joy and happiness in the various Onnele dialects. Speaking of the upcoming birth of John the Baptist, an angel tells Zechariah:

“You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.” (NASB)

In the Goiniri dialect, they have translated it like this:

“Sa yene ese aiyem wamo. Ka pinuma mingklari ese nulu mela namo, ka nu ese ainem empo mela namo yemeiye.” (Goiniri translation)

“Na yu bai amamas nogut tru. Na ol planti manmeri bai i lukim dispela pikinini, na ol bai i amamas long taim dispela pikinini i kamap.” (readable Tok Pisin parallel translation)

“And you will rejoice greatly. And many people will see this child, and they will rejoice when this child appears.” (literal English back translation)

In the Wolwale dialect, Joel (pictured above) determined that it needed to be expressed a bit differently for his people:

“Yene ese samo woluporo. Ka pinuma mingklari ese nuru mela namo ka nu ese wolpun uporo e taim wu yemei.” (Wolwale translation)

“Na yu bai amamas nogut tru. Na ol planti manmeri bai lukim dispela pikinini na ol bai i amamas long taim em ikamap.” (readable Tok Pisin back translation)

“And you will really liver-good. And many people will see this child and they will liver-stomach good at the time he appears.” (literal English back translation)

Zechariah was troubled and filled with fear when the angel appeared to him, but there was good reason to have joy (or a good liver) in the midst of his trouble. His child would prepare the people for the coming of the Lord himself.

For more about the dialect differences in this verse, see the post over at the AGAPHSEIS blog.

Onnele Team Prepares for Final Checking

Last week, I met with five Onnele translators at our regional center in Wewak to go over the Gospel of Luke and make sure it’s ready for final checking in October. From left to right, Dominic is from the Goiniri dialect of Onnele, James and Otto are from Romei-Barera, and Joel and Felix are from the Wolwale dialect.

These dialects are very closely related, but over the last eight years working with them, we have been constantly learning about their language differences and their need for separate (but related) translations. Where their languages are similar, we share translation decisions together, but where their languages are different, their translations must be different in order to effectively communicate the message of the Bible accurately, clearly, and naturally.

These are the northernmost varieties of a whole chain of related languages that spread across the mountains to the south. These men hope to not only continue translating God’s Word for their own people, but to someday help their neighbors to the south begin translation where there is no Scripture in the local language.