Bakwé Translation News
This January the Bakwé team and I will be working with a Wycliffe translation consultant to do a verse-by-verse check of our translation of 1st and 2nd Corinthians. Please keep us in your prayers! Especially pray for health and stamina for us all as we work on this together over 3-4 weeks.
Currently, my Bakwé colleague, Alexis, is working on the second draft of Revelation while I am working on the first draft of Matthew. Matthew is the last book of the New Testament we have to translate! Translation is a joy, and learning more Bakwé as I go along is a lot of fun. Every now and then a Bakwé equivalent will make me chuckle. In Bakwé, to be patient, or to be perserverant, means literally to “scratch inside the stomach.” So, recently when translating Revelation 1:9 the Bakwé say, ‟I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance [scratching-inside-the-stomach] of Jesus Christ, …” Of course, to the Bakwé it makes perfect sense!
We should finish up drafting the NT by March. Then it will take another year or more to get all the remaining books checked by a consultant. With the increased number of translations being done in Africa, there is a shortage of translation consultants to go round. Please pray that more consultants become available.
Other Bakwé books published
Every year we publish more Bakwé titles for the Bakwé reader. In our training in literacy we were told that a society will not be a literate society unless there are around 200 different titles available for people to read. This year we published another reading primer for one of the other big Bakwé dialects, a book on traditional funeral proceedings, a book on the history of the Bakwé, and finally a second printing of our bilingual dictionary.
