These aren’t great videos but they give you a flavor of the work we did on Friday and Saturday. The consultant for The Seed Company left and so Semo, Ilidio and I got to finish off the checking of John 21 in Nyungwe. I only lasted about 30 minutes on Friday afternoon before I started falling asleep. I guess the party on Thursday night was a little too wild. We were all more awake on Saturday morning. Speaking of the party, Semo was quite disappointed that we didn’t get Hilary and Jeni on film dancing to “Ndiye Jezu Wangu ambandifuna.” Some things just have to live on in the memory. The meal was memorable as well with potato soup and waffles. Jeni assured us that this is a very Swedish kind of meal.

The guys sing a song so I can get it recorded

The day after the party I asked the guys to sing some of the songs so I could get them recorded. “My Lord, send us your holy spirit.” It’s been a real battle to find Nyungwe church songs. Believers much prefer to sing in Chichewa or Shona. Why is that? I believe that when the Gospel enters people’s hearts, they will sing from their hearts. Until then Christianity is a borrowed religion.

Henry thinks he’s taking a picture but it’s actually video

Our week was pretty chaotic with two projects, four languages, several versions of reports to be sorted out, etc. But there was a wonderful spirit of cooperation and brotherly love. Stuart stayed with Semo and Ilidio and they really enjoyed talking. Semo’s English skills were strong enough to allow them to have some great conversations.

Casual day at the office

Semo’s in shorts. I’ve got my feet up on a chair. It hardly seems like the atmosphere conducive to getting work done…

Translating to the music of birdsong

I didn’t notice until I watched the video but there are three kinds of birds keeping us company: Heuglin’s Robins, sparrows and a rooster. As I mentioned in a previous post, the rooster crow actually made it into the translation as an ideophone. On Friday the subject of nakedness came up again. For some reason, Peter was naked in the boat fishing. Then he gets dressed and jumps in the water. How bizarre is that? We changed the wording slightly so that he is dressed or possibly has his shirt off and just gathers his clothes about him and jumps in.

Another part in John 21 that was fun to tighten up was the “Do you love me more than these?” section. We used two verbs to distinguish between AGAPAO and PHILEO, one being the general term, kufuna and the other being the more specific kuna lufoi. You can tell me that the words in Greek are the same but you probably think Ford and Chevy are the same thing too just because they’re both trucks. Repeat after me: Any change in surface form entails a change in meaning. So there. And the translators also changed “feed my sheep” to “shepherd my sheep” where the verb was different in the Greek.

And finally we spent quite a bit of time working on a footnote for John 21:18 which prefigures the martyrdom of Peter. The Nyungwe text essentially says, “you will put out your arms and someone else will dress you.” There wasn’t any elegant way to bring in the secondary meaning of crucifixion so we just mentioned it in a footnote so that verse 19 would make more sense.

Speaking of footnotes, I have the unpleasant task of fixing all the markup codes for footnotes and cross references. That has to be one of the most boring parts of Bible translation!