Translating Jita Jonah (part 8)

Samson and Magoma printing Jita Jonah on the risograph machine

Ok, we're done with the translation part of preparing the book of Jonah in the Jita language.

These were the steps so far...

Step 1 - DRAFTING: The Jita translators adapted the book from Swahili to Jita.
Step 2 - TRANSLATION ADVISOR CHECKING: I studied the text to make sure the meaning of the original was communicated accurately.
Step 3 - COMMUNITY TESTING: We invited Jita speakers to listen to the text and help us make improvements.
Step 4 - CONSULTANT CHECKING: We worked with a veteran Bible translator to make improvements.
Step 5 - SPELL CHECKING: We carefully checked the text for spelling, punctuation, grammar and any other errors.
Step 6 - READ ALOUD CHECK: We read the text out loud, watched for punctuation and listened for naturalness.
Step 7 - TYPESETTING: We designed a printer-ready copy of Jonah with illustrations and captions.

Now we get to print the book of Jonah....

Step 8 - PRINTING

This might not seem like a big deal but think about it...this is the first time the book of Jonah has been published in the Jita language...EVER! It's a huge deal. We worked with our friend Samson from the Literacy Department. He helped us choose the cardstock for our cover and then he copied the cover on our risograph machine. Here's a quick video..

Our SIL office here in Musoma just recently received this risograph machine. Now our Literacy Department can print their own reading primers and transition literacy booklets. And in the Translation Department we can print our own (short) books of the Bible. This is much better and faster than sending the job to a print shop in Dar es Salaam.

After Samson printed the covers, he printed the inside pages, lined them up and stapled them together. We decided we would start with a print run of 200 copies. There are 205,000 Jita people in the Mara region so hopefully we will need to print more copies later. (Let's pray!)

Stay tuned for the most exciting step of all...Distribution!

Rhino-beetle

Check out the latest discovery in "Wild Africa."

Translating Jita Jonah (part 7)

WOW! It's a long process to prepare a book of the Bible for publication.

Step 1 - DRAFTING: The Jita translators adapted the book from Swahili to Jita.
Step 2 - TRANSLATION ADVISOR CHECKING: I studied the text to make sure the meaning of the original was communicated accurately.
Step 3 - COMMUNITY TESTING: We invited Jita speakers to listen to the text and help us make improvements.
Step 4 - CONSULTANT CHECKING: We worked with a veteran Bible translator to make improvements.
Step 5 - SPELL CHECKING: We carefully checked the text for spelling, punctuation, grammar and any other errors.
Step 6 - READ ALOUD CHECK: We read the text out loud, watched for punctuation and listened for naturalness.

We're almost ready to publish the book of Jonah. But first, we format the text correctly in a step called...

Step 7 - TYPESETTING

Here's a portion of Jonah chapter 3 in the Jita language. It's all ready for publication.

For this step, we worked with a typesetter in the UK to produce a printer-ready PDF of the book of Jonah. We went back and forth by email examining our section headings, choosing a font that is clear and readable, selecting illustrations, writing captions, obtaining copyright permission for illustrations, designing white space and margins, writing the book introduction and finding the best wording for our title.

For our title, we chose...

"The Book of the Prophet Jonah in the Jita Language"

We even got to choose the color of the front cover? Any guesses?????

Pork Day Hallelujah

YAY!!! It's Pork Day....



We bought 3 kilos of pork and it arrived freshly slaughtered, still warm, in plastic bags, with hair and bone and etc. Jeannette chopped it, cleaned it and prepared it for cooking. This time she put some in the freezer for pork stir fry in the future and she put a big chunk in the slow cooker with her homemade thyme bar-b-q sauce. It was AMAZING! She even made cornbread and coleslaw to go with it.

Thank you, God, for making pigs.

Thank you, God, for my wise, wonderful, good cook wife.

Translating Jita Jonah (part 6)

So we continue our series about translating Jonah in the Jita language...

Step 1 - DRAFTING: The Jita translators adapted the book from Swahili to Jita.
Step 2 - TRANSLATION ADVISOR CHECKING: I studied the text to make sure the meaning of the original was communicated accurately.
Step 3 - COMMUNITY TESTING: We invited Jita speakers to listen to the text and help us make improvements.
Step 4 - CONSULTANT CHECKING: We worked with a veteran Bible translator to make improvements.
Step 5 - SPELL CHECKING: We carefully checked the text for spelling, punctuation, grammar and any other errors.

Now it's time for...
Step 6 - READ ALOUD CHECK

Neema, Ben and Magoma reading the book of Jonah in Jita

This is a fun step because we move away from our desks and computers and go outside into the fresh air. We read the whole book as a narrative, as a story, and listen to how it sounds.



As we read, we listen for natural pauses in the story and make sure that our punctuation is helpful to the reader. We also make sure that the story flows easily and that each paragraph is connected to the next. We even discovered a few phrases that were not clear so we made some minor adjustments.

This particular day was exciting because as we were reading out loud, two of the office workers, also Jita speakers, stopped their work because they were entranced by the sound of God's Word in their own language. Again, I find myself thanking God for the privilege of serving with this team.

fresh eggs

I just bought fresh eggs from a guy who has a house full of chickens. Not a chicken coop...a house. When I say fresh I mean warm and gooey with feathers stuck on them. And they're really good eggs!

And do you want to hear the best part? We leave our eggs sitting on the kitchen counter....for weeks! They don't need to be refrigerated. Welcome to Tanzania.

Translating Jita Jonah (part 5)

We continue our series about how we translated the book of Jonah into the Jita language...

Step 1 - DRAFTING: The Jita translators adapted the book from Swahili to Jita.
Step 2 - TRANSLATION ADVISOR CHECKING: I studied the text to make sure the meaning of the original was communicated accurately.
Step 3 - COMMUNITY TESTING: We invited Jita speakers to listen to the text and help us make improvements.
Step 4 - CONSULTANT CHECKING: We worked with a veteran Bible translator to make improvements.

Now we move to what many of you will say is the most boring step of all:

Step 5 - SPELL CHECKING

But really it's lots of fun...really...

Ben, Neema and Magoma spell-checking the book of Jonah in the Jita language

Now, before you ask, the answer is "NO" we can't just use the automatic spell checker in our word processing program.  It would look like this...

However, there is a spell checking tool in our translation software. The challenge is, we have to teach it which words are good Jita words. So maybe by the time we finish translating half of the Bible the spell checking dictionary will be full of good Jita words. But for now, we check each word.

And we don't only check spelling. We also look for punctuation mistakes, inconsistencies, and grammar mistakes. For example,

Two of the most difficult punctuation problems involve these two little symbols [^] and [:]. Since Jita is a tonal language, two words might be spelled the same but pronounced differently depending on tone. Therefore, [neerukire] could mean "I ran" (distant past tense more than two days ago) if pronounced one way and "I have already run" (focusing on the completion of the action) if pronounced another way. So our amazing linguist friends here in Musoma have decided to use the symbol [:] to mark distant past.

In our spell check of Jonah 4:2, I noticed that our translation missed the [:] and sounded like, "for this reason I have already run to Tarshish." Nope. We added the [:] to make it, "for this reason I ran to Tarshish."

The other symbol [^] distinguishes between third person narrative tense and first person recent past. Therefore, [neeyumbakira] could mean "then he built for himself" or if pronounced another way could mean "I built for myself." In Jonah 4:5, we missed the [^] so it sounded like Jonah went out of the city and I made a shelter for myself. OOPS!

Another challenge in writing Jita is the use of long vowels. For example, [okukora] means "to do" and [okukoora] means "to be late." Therefore, the vowel length must be written. This is very important in Jonah 1:10 when the sailors ask Jonah, "Why have you done this?" If we accidentally wrote the long vowel it would be, "Why are you late?"

I think we all feel the importance of spell-checking. Just try to read this messed up verse without cringing...

And he prayed to the LORD said, "O Lord, is not this not what I say when I was yet in my country, That is why I made haste to flea to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracius God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?'

Exactly! THAT'S why we take the time to check spelling and grammar and punctuation.