last week of VITAL

Having completed the first draft translation of the book of Mark, the last week of VITAL, Feb 26-29, the participants spent working on consistency checking and back translation. The consistency checking includes checking for consistency in spelling and looking at each occurrence key words such as God, angel, baptism, cross, etc. and making sure that they were translated consistently (or if not, that there was a good reason). Back translation is when someone that has not been involved with the translation, takes that translation and translates it “back” into English (in VITAL, we used the literacy workers that were already on site, but who had not helped with the translation of these portions of Mark). This is yet another check to make sure that the intended meaning is being conveyed (other checks are done with advisers/mentors, with groups of people in their villages between modules, and with trained consultants).

Helping one of the language groups with these checks was one of my highlights for VITAL.

photo courtesy of Joanna Frampton

The mentor for this group is a Papua New Guinean man with 17 years of translation experience (on my left, in the striped shirt). He was a part of the translation team for a neighboring language group, and after the completion of the New Testament, he wanted to help other language groups to translate the Bible into their own languages. It was really awesome to get to work with this language team, helping them with the computer and English side of things, and learning more about their language and translation in the process!