Trip to PNG

Above: Checking session in Alotau, Papua New Guinea. From l-r: me, Joanna Framptom (from New Zealand), Siyokira, Robat, and Stuart.

I've just completed another trip to PNG. This one was a bit longer than most since I had to go to our main center of Ukarumpa. I spent 4 weeks there to sell a lot of our things, store some and send the rest home. I also had to do some repairs on our house and prepare it to be sold. It's up for sale along with 14 others. Some have been for sale for over a year now. So I don't know if ours will sell any time soon.

The rest of the time was spent in Alotau to have Matthew, Galatians, and 2 Thessalonians checked. The way the checking is done is quite simple. I had translated the three books back into English as literally as possible and still have it make any sense. The consultant then read through them comparing them to the Greek. She looked for things I left out, things that looked too literal from the Greek that might not make sense to a speaker of Gumawana, things that looked more like my theology was coming through and things that were just plain wrong. When we met in Alotau I had 4 men come from Nubogeta to work with us on the check. Three of the men had not worked on the books. The other one, Tomasi, worked on all of them. So he was not allowed to answer the questions. The consultant asked me questions, which I translated into Gumawana. The men then looked at the text and answered the questions. From that we could tell if the translation was clear.

Checking is hard work for all involved believe it or not. It took a week to do Matthew, 2 days to do Galatians and one morning to do 2 Thessalonians. I could tell by the end of the first week the three men were burned out from the intense concentration and having to answer so many questions. We did find a number of places that needed to be fixed. We were grateful to find those now and not after it was published.

The hardest part for me is having to listen to the answers the men gave and remember all that they said so I could translate it for the consultant. Often Siyokira would give an answer that would go for several minutes. Then there were those moments where I forgot that the consultant didn't know Gumawana and tried to give the answer to her in Gumawana!

I was very impressed with how well the translation turned out which was evidenced by the answers they gave. One thing the consultant will do sometimes is ask them to read the text then close the book and try to tell it back. It really is a great way to tell whether the text is put together well. If the person cannot tell it back with good chronology and a number of minor details, most likely the text is poorly constructed. I tested this out with a group of adults one time and it was amazing how accurate people can retell when a text is well structured. When it is not, most details are left out, only a small amount of the main story is remembered or they get most of the details wrong. The reason this works is that as a person tells a story the listener is creating in his mind a mental image of what took place. The better the story is put together the clearer the picture will be in the listener's mind enabling him to easily recall it.

I have also discovered that distractions can make it difficult to recall information as well. A lawn mower going can be enough for someone not to remember the details of what is read. For that reason we had an interesting incident which I relate in our latest newsletter. We were reading in Matthew 20 about the 2 blind men who call out to Jesus. As I was reading Tomasi and Stuart were talking and I knew this would make it hard for the other 2 to concentrate and remember the details. So as I was reading I raised my hand to attempt to signal them to be quiet. As I did this I came to the place where the crowd rebuked the 2 men. At that moment I read with great emphasis "And the crowd said, 'You be quiet!'" As soon as I read that silence fell on the group until the words sunk in and then we all burst out laughing. I couldn't have planned it to happen that way. But it did lighten up the tenseness in the room so that we could proceed with the checking.

One great benefit of checking our translations this way is that these men at the end of the checking know that they can trust it for accuracy. It has a stamp of approval and they experienced the torture of going through the process. They will be good PR back in the village and later when the NT is completed, they will be giving a great testimony to its reliability.

When checking we have learned that when the person gives a wrong answer, it doesn't automatically mean that the text is wrong. We have to usually ask more questions to find out why the person answers the way he did. During this session several times I asked the men where in the text they were seeing the answer to their question. If they can't point to it in the text, I know they were just giving their opinion and their answer was not based on what they read. The answers to most questions are in the text so we encourage them to read and then reread the text to find it.

Some of the questions are very difficult. The purpose often is to make sure the text does not produce some wild ideas. But even for the difficult questions they produced some very good sound answers. These men have learned a tremendous amount about reading a text. And I learned again about how to ask questions properly. If you ask the question wrong, undoubtedly you will get a wrong answer. Same in the checking. Reading fluency really is an art that is achieved only through practice. This is true for the Gumawana speakers as well as English or any other language. To get the most of any text it takes work to really understand what the author intended. This is difficult in a translation because so much of what is in the original is from a culture that is very different from the target language, in this case Gumawana. And it takes a lot of work to constantly look at each clause and see how it is related to its context. This is what these men were having to do for 8 days straight as we went verse by verse through the three books we were translating.

Matthew is much easier to check because it is narrative with some teaching. But Galatians and 2 Thessalonians were much more difficult. There it is not a matter of just retelling a story. Instead they had to draw inferences from what we had written. They had to follow the argument of Galatians which is not always easy.

Now that these books are finished, we have 50% of the NT checked. If we can finish John and 1 Corinthians this year we will have another 25% that is translated and needing to be checked, leaving just 8 books to finish the NT!

Thank you for praying for this work.