Preparations for Comprehension Checking

Look! I AM actually doing work! It's just not very exciting right now. 

The following is to inform more than entertain, though I promise to strive to be as entertaining as possible.

We've been sent out to the jungle by you (assuming that you're a financial partner, I think some, most? All? I have no idea who reads this blog… There's not a lot of feedback I receive… It's like typing into a void… …. …….) to do a job. And so far you've heard that we've finished POC (YAY!), a bit about next steps, and that our lives have been full of medical visa chaos for the sake of leaving the country we just arrived in to deliver a baby. Now I will admit that this baby is less essential to our successful ministry than the first baby. (In this culture, you're not a full-fledged adult unless you have a child, and we needed to be peers with the adults of the village to minister to the best of our ability.) However, I think that growing ones family at a facility equipped to handle nearly any complication is a reasonable enough reason to work long distance for a few months. But more about that assignment later…

NOW I'm going to tantalize/traumatize you with the details of what I'm working on now as good evidence that in the midst of medical visa chaos, I am doing work remarkably similar to the work I said I would be doing (but not the same because that can't happen until we allocate)!!

So Language Group #1 is pretty close to spitting out Matthew in published print! But so was this other language group to printing their whole NT when they realized that the final draft was a bit more like a rough draft than the final draft ought to be. Turns out, they never did a naturalness check!!
Gah!!!

We have, like, a million different checks that translations need to go through. And it's not because we find some sick pleasure in watching teams jump through hoops of fire. It's because when we finally get done and spend a TON of money on printing, we don't want to pass out Scripture and hear, "I'm not going to read this! It hurts my ears! This butchery of my language."

So we looked at this language group and then looked back over our shoulders at Language Group #1 and thought, "Hmmm, maybe we'd better…." So we're doing a village check!

Now the reason we're going out is so we can see a potential allocation.

But the village check is extremely important and needs to get done.

But not at the cost of us getting a feel for the place.

But the people I'd work with and how they work together and with me is half the feel.

But I need to find friends and people I like and get to know people.

But this is really important work, too.

Ok, whatever. We'll put the balancing game in the dexterous hands of the Lord and proceed with preparing for a village checking session.

Ok, so we're trying to ask questions to accomplish a couple different goals. We want everything to sound natural. We want everything to be clear. And we want everything to be correct.

So if I say, "Jesus got on the boat and went across the lake." That needs to be a natural sounding sentence (meh, more or less, a little abrupt but let's assume there's more context and roll with it), it needs to be clear (yep, I think you would have to try to misunderstand something in that sentence), and it needs to be correct (whoops! It was actually his disciples! He went on the mountainside to pray.)

So we have to ask questions about EVERYTHING. Every little.tiny.thing. 

Ok so we pick out 9 chapters to check.

Now, like a very good little Master's student, I wrote out all the questions. ALL the questions. ALL of the questions for EVERY little.tiny.thing. 

I had 22 pages of questions for not even three chapters of Matthew. And I hated my life.

So I scrapped that (a week of labor!) and did this instead!! (Worth it!)

("oooo" "ahhh" "Pretty!" "How aesthetically pleasing!") (Click to make it larger)

Ok so!

• First I ask a theme question, like "What's the main point of this passage?" or, like illustrated above, "What did Jesus' disciples learn in this story?"
• Then I ask an overview question. "What happened in this story?" and as they go over it, I'll put a check mark over each bit of highlighted/colored text as they mention it. Then if they missed something, I can ask about it specifically (which would be considered a detail question), just to make sure that they only didn't mention it and not that they didn't understand it.
• Meanwhile! I'll ask detail questions (sometimes the highlighting doesn't do the question justice, so I wrote it in the spreadsheet) and implication questions.
  Implication questions ask about things that we (correctly) assume when we read the text (and so did the original audience) and we want to make sure that understanding is passed on. The last implication question above says, "Why did Jesus forbid the disciples [from saying that he was the Messiah]?" We'd want an answer like, "It wasn't time for everybody to know" or "if the Pharisees heard that, they'd try to kill Jesus before his time had come" or "the people might try to make him king again". But if we got an answer like, "this information is the secret to getting cargo and you have to keep it a secret otherwise it will lose its cargo getting powers" (which honestly could be a perceived meaning in Papuan culture…) we would need to deal with that. 
• Finally I ask about the text itself (those questions are kept on a bookmark of sorts, not illustrated here, because they really apply to every text). "What kind of text is this? Narrative? Sermon? Letter? Prophecy?" "Who wrote it?" "Do they have a mastery language?" Here we're trying to make sure that The Sermon on the Mount doesn't read like a fairy tale a woman is telling to a child, because no one is going to take that seriously. And I, also, ask about revision ideas. "How could this sound more natural?" "Was there something that was a little confusing that we could make better?"

So I'm nearly finished writing all my questions for Matthew 14-16 and I'm done with Matthew 26-28 and the Director of Language Affairs, who's accompanying us on this venture, is doing 5-7. (Things started going MUCH faster when I stopped doing things "the proper" way.) And then hopefully, we'll be taking it to the village next week. 

MAIN IDEA!!! READ THIS!!! IF YOU SKIP ALL THE OTHER THINGS READ THIS!!!!!!
Ok.

Translation is boring. Except for me and people like me and even sometimes for me and people like me. You may have heard some excellent stories from translators, but those are the highlights. The BULK of it is boring. Boooooooring.

Transformed lives is amazing. You may have heard an awesome tale about a language blooper that was caught in a checking session, but if you've heard a story of life change happening through the Scriptures being presented in someone's heart language for the first time, you'll probably realize the word "awesome" was underappreciated in your usage.

Transformed lives is our goal. Transformed lives is why you funded us and sent us. And translation (which is way less boring than what Jacob's working on right now!) is just a tool to that end.

Transformed lives is what we need to be praying for. Yes, yes, please pray that our travel is graced by the ill-defined "traveling mercies" and that our checking progress is stellar. And please please pray that we have a clear yes or no from God about working with this people group long term, but please please, please please pray that through this God would transform lives. That when we present this Scripture, mostly likely for the first time in their own language, that it touch their souls in an irreparable way.