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Two Thousand Pages of Word Checks in a Single Workshop?
The following article by Dr. Connie Champeon, Bibles International’s literacy and linguistics coordinator, was written in Myanmar when she and a team from our office worked there during the last quarter of 2008. Included in that team were her husband, Birch, who serves as BI’s information technology coordinator, translation consultants Ross and Cathy Hodsdon, and a handful of trained, short-term volunteers. This report gives an insight into the complexities of a Scripture translation workshop.
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Last week saw a major victory for Birch. For several years, he has been using programs to generate key word checklists. This has sped up the translation process significantly while also increasing the accuracy of these checks. We have been using a very shortened form of key word checklists for the Old Testament (OT) instead of a complete set like we have for the New Testament. My mother, consultant Cathy Hodsdon,  has been working to create a complete key word checklist for the OT for several years enlisting the help of many volunteers along the way. She finished the list for the Pentateuch just before we arrived in Myanmar. She had been pushing to finish this work by the time we arrived because she was scheduled to do checking with the Tedim Chin people who want to print a trial edition of the Pentateuch in their language in time for their church’s anniversary celebration in March.
We were discouraged with the overall condition of the texts of the Pentateuch which we were given. It took our short termers several days to reformat these pages so that Birch could even begin to generate the key word checklists. When Birch ran the checklists on just the first five books in the Tedim language, we were all shocked when the lists were 2000 pages long!
Cathy was overwhelmed! It would be impossible for the consultants and national translators to do even a fraction of the work while Cathy was with them, let alone be ready to print the Pentateuch by March. Birch decided to try some software he and a volunteer, Dan Dennison, have been developing.
It took a lot of work. Several nights they worked into the wee hours of the morning. There were lots of emails and electronic chats back and forth between Birch, Dan, and the original software developer. Finally the morning the translation consultants and national translators were to start the key word checking, Birch got the program to work in the new software.
What did this do for them? Cathy put the words from the checklist up on the overhead projector. They started with the word father which is supposed to occur 413 times in the Pentateuch. Each verse in Tedim which should have the word for father was listed. The first verse they came to was Genesis 2:24. In this verse the Tedim people translated father as "pa." This is the most common word for father in Tedim Chin. It is what you would expect to see in almost every one of these 351 verses. So mom approved "pa" as an acceptable translation for father. Instantly that word was highlighted every time it occurred in the verses in the list. They no longer had to check every single verse to see how father was translated. All the verses that had the expected word now had it clearly marked. They could quickly scan through them and only focus on the verses that did not have that word, did not have it often enough, or had it too many times.
The national translators and BI consultants are very excited that with the new tool, accuracy has been greatly enhanced and the time required for this task has been greatly reduced. The BI consultants are particularly grateful. Cathy thanks Birch for it at least once a day. They still have a lot of things they are trying to develop using the new software but Birch is hoping to begin training all our translators and consultants to use it by the beginning of the year [2009]. They probably will not be able to finish the checks before we leave this time, but if they can have another workshop the first of the year they may be able to finish the work by March.
The new software has also served to get a whole new group of Bible college teachers and pastors excited about the translation. They are thrilled to see how beautiful and readable it is becoming. They are also very excited about the word studies and tools they could develop using these checklists and this software.
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