I'm holding Liyan here. She seems to have become a good friend over the last couple of years.
Very soon I will be making another trip to Papua New Guinea. This trip will be different in many respects from the previous trips I've made. This time I will spend several weeks at our main center in the highlands of PNG. I will be putting our house there up for sale since it is sitting empty and has been for over a year and a half. So to do that I need to get our things out. Some I will sell off and others I will pack and some will be sent back to the States.
Once that is done I head to Alotau, the provincial capital of the Milne Bay Province. I have planned to have some of the men come from Nubogeta in order to check Matthew, Galatians, and 2 Thessalonians. A consultant will come to do the checking in two weeks.
Some people may not realize the process the translation goes through. Once a book is finished, we check it in the village with people who did not work on it. The goal is to find out if it is clear and understandable. When that is done the book is then translated back into English (and thus it is called a "back-translation" or VE "vernacular to English") so that a consultant can check it against the Greek or Hebrew. A checking session involves having native speakers answer the consultant's questions to check again for clarity. This is our quality control and is quite effective for finding mistakes. We want the translation to be clear, natural, and understandable.
You can be praying for this trip. If you would like to be a part of the Gumawana translation, just click on the "Become a financial partner with the Olsons" on the right side of this blog.
At the moment I am working on 1 Corinthians. I do a first rough translation which I will be able to give to the translators while I'm over in PNG this time. They can go through it and make corrections so that when I return to work on it they will have already worked through it.
I'm also continuing work on a grammar paper dealing with how Gumawana speakers mark participants in a story. I have been working on this paper for some time and would like very much to finish it. I am getting close but as I work on it I find other interesting aspects which I think are important to understand to make a better translation. Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on the pronouns. One huge difference between English and Gumawana is that Gumawana has two sets of pronouns, whereas English has just one. Every verb in Gumawana has the subject attached as a prefix. So where English would say "he said" Gumawana uses one word idigo. The i-means "third person". It could refer to "he, she, or it". The prefixes are not stressed. But there is a second set of pronouns which are not attached to the verb. These are stressed pronouns. The goal is to figure out when it is necessary for them to occur. So to find out I have to read story after story in Gumawana marking every occurrence of the pronouns. I also have to do some reading of grammars from other languages to see what kinds of things pronouns do there. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. I am beginning to make some progress on this area, but still have a ways to go.
So that is where I am at the moment.
