Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Right now I'm working on the back-translation of the gospel of Matthew. Some people may not know what a back-translation is so let me explain. When we finish a draft of a book like Matthew. I will go through edit it, put in section headings and references. When that is done I test it out with people in the village to see if it is clear, accurate, and sounds like the way they speak. When that is finished then I translate the book from Gumawana back into English making it as literal as possible. This copy will be given to a translation consultant who will check the book against the Greek. He will look for things I have omitted, things I have inserted which may be a problem, places where he thinks a native speaker might get the wrong meaning or no meaning at all when it is read. This is our quality control.
Now you know what a back-translation is. The other name we use is VE for vernacular to English translation.

No comments: