continued elsewhere...

My blog continues in a new format here

and breathe...

The translation team is currently working through Numbers, and recently we arrived at 16:22, which in one English version says:

“But Moses and Aaron fell facedown and cried out, 'O God, God of the spirits of all mankind, will you be angry with the entire assembly when only one man sins?'”

Translated literally back into English, our Monkolé draft translation began the reported speech in this verse, “God, because of whom everything exists ...”

Now in Hebrew it actually says something like, “God, God of the spirits of all flesh”. “Spirit” here is a word for spirit, breath or wind, and “flesh” is a word which can apply to human beings and/or animals.

I felt that our translation was missing the point. Moses and Aaron are afraid that in His anger God will kill (even more of) the Israelites, and so they are reminding Him that these people only have life/breath in them because He gave it to them, and they are urging Him to think twice before taking it away again.

One of the problems was that in Monkolé the word for “lives” and “exists” are the same, though in the above example from our first draft translation it has to be “exists” since we are talking about “everything” (and not all things live). But we managed to get closer to the (I believe) intended meaning by changing our translation to “God, because of whom all living/breathing creatures live/exist”. It isn't quite the same as the English because this translation chose to understand “flesh” as meaning purely human beings. It would actually be very hard to do this in Monkolé while keeping the idea of “breath”/“life” so we have left it as all living/breathing beings.

kids

The church kids' camp for which we translated 2 Kings 4 and 5 took place last week. There were 166 kids at it! Here are a few photos:

a quick dip

The translation team is currently working through Numbers, but this week one of the church elders asked us if we could give them the text of 2 Kings 4 and 5 for the children's camp being held later this month. We said yes, of course!

So the beginning of this week was taken up with converting an old-format file of the draft version of 2 Kings into the format we now use, and then reading through and working on it to make it as accurate, readable and consistent (with other books) as possible. It is important that Elisha and Naaman's names are spelt the same way in 2 Kings and in Luke, that Carmel is spelt the same way everywhere it is mentioned and so on. We have words like "naa" and "na" which we need to try not to mix up, and we had to discuss whether certain sentences were better worded as questions or as affirmations.

In Hebrew Elisha is called the "man of God" in many parts of these chapters, but in Monkolé that just sounded weird, so we put "prophet of God" instead. And we had several discussions about where an extra "i" should be added onto the end of a word ... it sort of gives focus to the sentence ... but I never have much to add to these particular debates, which really need native Monkolé speakers!

We had some interesting discussions as we worked, particularly about Gehazi's behaviour in 2 Kings 5:20-2 (I'll leave you to look it up if you're interested!).

ironing

Sometimes I liken my work to ironing. A lot of what I do is trying to smooth out "creases". Correcting spelling mistakes and typos, making sure that names of people and places are spelled the same way every time they appear, making sure we have consistent vocabulary and so on. Sometimes it is frustrating to come across old drafts which are very "wrinkled", but there is a certain satisfaction in working on them and seeing them become flat and pristine.

The ironic thing is that in the real world I hate ironing!

14th August 2004

Our marriage is ten years young...

"We love because he first loved us." I John 4:l9

schizophrenic sky

I wish I had a wider-angle lense, because the further left you looked, the blacker the cloud became ... and it's a pity you can't hear the rumbles of thunder too! The other funny thing is that the cloud was moving towards me, so one side of the sky remained blue, while this huge thundercloud loomed overhead ... or at least on the righthand side of overhead!

Leviticus. Check!

I am happy to report that our week of checking ended with us finishing Leviticus - with just ten minutes to spare! Halfway through the week I really wasn't sure we'd make it, but it is always a tidy feeling to finish a week with a completed book. At the same time, the most important thing is to do the work well, so we'd never rush it just to be able to say we'd got it done.

I always have mixed feelings about our checking weeks. My team is great, and works really well with our consultant, Pierre, so I always enjoy the time we spend together. The work is intellectually challenging, and yet at the same time if there are no problems with our translation then I'm not actively doing anything except listening, which requires a lot of concentration.

I have to work fulltime during these weeks, and while that isn't a problem from the point of view of the work, I do miss spending time with my kids!

Translation work doesn't make for the most exciting photos. To make a change, I asked Marc to take a photo of us during a coffee break this last week. From left to right: me, Philémon, Pastor Samuel and our consultant, Pierre.

spot the odd one out!

what missionaries do in their time off...

(What?! Missionaries get time off?)

This is Family Fun Day - hosted by TWR and enjoyed by missionaries and ex-pats living in Benin...

Anniversary joy!

This Sunday, Pastor Samuel and his wife Hélène invited the whole church to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary with them after the service. They had made fish sandwiches and hot chocolate for everyone - quite a feat! - and it was wonderful to see the smiles on their faces. They are such lovely people, and such a great example of what marriage can be when two people serve God together.

computers and clouds

Last week the translation team attended a workshop about our translation computer programme, Paratext, in Parakou. Here you can see all the participants (except me!):

And here are Pastor Samuel and Philémon listening intently:

Back in the office this week, and I'm all on my own as my translators are taking their annual leave...

... but working on three computers at once. Perhaps it's because I was afraid the computers would get lonely ... or perhaps I thought it would stop me from feeling too lonely ... or maybe it is just that after last week's workshop I wanted to get all our computer files up to date!

The translators have taken their annual leave to go and work in their fields, preparing the ground and planting. The rains have started, and so we are seeing lots of skies like these (both photos taken today):

(It's a pity about the electric wires getting in the way, especially since they do us no good at all!)

tired eyes?

Last week we were working on Job chapter 31 and in verse 16 the Hebrew speaks of Job (hypothetically) causing the eyes of the widow to fail. The idea is that she would have hoped to receive charity from him which never came.

One of the French versions says "si j'ai laissé les yeux de la veuve s'épuiser", "if I let the widow's eyes become exhausted". This seems to be what gave the Monkolé draft which said, "mà ǹ nɔ ǹ jɔ̀ jaaɔ̃ gɔ í cɔ sim kpãai ngɔgɔ hee ijuɛ í gbɛɛji", literally "or did I let a widow hope* something from me until her eye was tired". As we worked through the draft together, one of my translators said, "we'll have to take out the words 'her eye', because eyes can't get tired [in Monkolé], only people can" but the other translator said, "or we can leave 'her eye', but say 'was dry'".

So our version now has the widow watching until her eye is dry. I love these little details which should make our Bible sound more Monkolé!

*And as an added note, "to hope" in Monkolé is "to watch the path"

Scenes from our travels

A few things we saw on our most recent travels. Firstly, a lorry which had broken down completely blocking the road! Apparently he knew he was running out of diesel, thought he'd turn around and go back to Parakou ... and ran out entirely while turning round! Here he is:

The taxi which stopped in front of us opened its boot to give the sheep some air:

This is a bus we saw as we left Parakou the next day, which presumably doesn't belong to a French football team any more...

This is the kind of thing we see far too much of:

You can carry anything on the back of a motorbike (though presumably it was empty!):

And this is what we actually see during most of our journey down the country. Frankly not all that interesting!

double wedding

We attended a double wedding in the village last Saturday. Here is the first bridegroom, waiting for his bride ... the veiled woman in the chair next to him is an older lady who is just teasing him!

The second couple after the brides had arrived. I mentioned once before that such a solemn occasion means that couples don't smile during the ceremony - very strange for us!

A "where's Wally?" moment - see if you can spot the missionaries in the crowd:

A big thank-you to the Director of SIM France, Jean Salmeron, who was visiting us and took these photos.

why?

I am sometimes asked, respectfully, whether it is really necessary to translate the Bible into local languages when "most people" speak French. After all, if sermons can be translated on-the-spot, couldn't the same be done with the Bible?

My first answer to this is actually a question. Do you understand everything you read in the Bible when you read it in your mother tongue? I suspect the answer to this will be no, or else you are avoiding the bits you don't like! And if the answer is no, then why add a layer of difficulty for Bible readers by demanding that they read it in their second language?

My second, and similar, answer comes from my experience as a member of a Bible translation team. I have a lot of respect for my colleagues on the team, and if you spoke with them in French you would find them competent speakers. But that is very different from understanding the nuances, rhetoric and irony of a literary text in another language. Some of the drafts we've worked on (and it may have been previous translators who originally translated them) read like they've been translated by a computer. The vocabulary seems about right, but the meaning is garbled.

So that is why I think it is important that people have the Bible in their own language. If nothing else, if they don't understand the text, it is important that they know that it is the text itself which is difficult to understand. If they suspect that it is their own lack of fluency in their second language which is a preventing them from understanding God's word, it discourages them from even trying.

As an example of mis-use of a second language, the youth of our church, who are educated in French, recently made themselves a T-shirt exhorting others to "Sois un modèle à égard." Not only is this a misquote of the Bible (probably based on I Tim. 4:12 or Titus 2:6-7) it is bad French which you would have thought someone would have noticed before getting however many tens of T-shirts printed. It does make you wonder whether they actually understand the sentence, or at least more than the first three words. Often when reading in another language, we are convinced we understand, but our understanding is based on assumptions and expectations rather than the actual words (this happens too of course, though to a lesser extent, in our first language).

And a quotation which has another take on the question:

The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner. —William Cameron Townsend

tiny fufu dabii

Further to my last post, I thought I would share that Eve's new nickname is "fufu dabii", due to her unpredictable but determined path around the house, and her tendancy to pick up small objects on her way and drop them randomly several metres further on...

Apologies for the slight fuzziness, she often moves too fast for the camera to focus!

wandering wind

One of the tell-tale signs of hot season are dust devils, kind of like mini-whirlwinds (there is an interesting article on wikipedia if you want more details on what they are!). Most of them we see are under a metre wide and just a few metres high, but occasionally a larger one whips through our property sending dust flying (we run round trying to shut all windows if we can!).

In Monkolé they are called "fufu dabii" (= wandering wind) and people are wary of them. Some people try to throw stones at them to make them go away, and there is a belief that firing a gun into them will "kill" them.

We saw this bigger one a few weeks ago:

on being try-lingual... (part 2)

More answers to questions I was asked by my friend's students:

Your personal perspective:

Which language do you feel is more useful/ important to you?

It depends on the situation! I can't imagine not speaking my mother tongue to my children. But because I met and got to know my husband in France speaking French, I like speaking French with him, and it reminds me of our “roots”, especially since we are no longer in France. For my Bible translation work, Hebrew, Monkolé and French are essential, and English is extremely useful.

Which do you feel you can express yourself best in? Do you ‘think’ in all of them?

I don't feel handicapped in French compared to English. I know that some people say that when they are angry or upset they can only express themselves effectively in their mother tongue, but I don't find that. Monkolé is a lot more difficult, partly because I have been learning it for a shorter time (4 years), and partly because there is a whole very different mentality and culture behind it. But that makes it all the more fascinating to learn! Sometimes someone says something, and even though you understand all the individual words you don't understand what they mean put together, or the point of what they are saying.

I definitely think in both English and French, depending on the situation and the people I'm with. I assume I must think in Monkolé when I'm speaking it, as I don't translate from another language to speak it.

For example, once when our consultant was with us, and we were working in French, I looked up and from our office window I saw some people arriving at our house. Without thinking I exclaimed in Monkolé, “Oh, it's the X family! They said they'd be calling in today, and I completely forgot...” then suddenly switched to French to say to our consultant, “Oops, sorry!” as he doesn't speak Monkolé. My other two colleagues with whom I do speak Monkolé were present, and I can only assume that somehow my brain “tuned in” to them, or else to the environment of our office, which is usually a totally Monkolé-speaking zone to me!

birds

After my photos of flowers, here are a couple of the birds we've seen recently in our compound. Firstly a red-billed hornbill:

Brown(?) babblers:

(Thanks to Marc for the photos and my parents for the identification!)

travelling

Car journeys – and to a far less frequent extent flights – are part of our life as missionaries. We tend to reckon that we end up travelling at least to Parakou, where the mission has its headquarters, every six weeks to two months. This is easier than it was in the past – since the road was mended it takes 3 hours instead of 4 ½ to 5 hours. If we need to get all the way to Cotonou for our papers it is more like 10 hours driving (we split it into two days) and it is a long haul!!

Practice makes perfect when it comes to packing. Things you forgot once, you are less likely to forget another time, though with small children their needs change all the time, so our packing list has to evolve with them.

I don't know that we ever really get used to driving here, though. It is just not all that safe, and every journey we find ourselves seeing things which make us go, "What...?!" By the grace of God we have been protected until now – the worst accident we had was when our exhaust pipe suddenly dropped off, which was impressive but did no harm to anyone except the car – but I know that Marc, who does nearly all the driving, gets stressed for about 24 hours before every journey.

It bothers me for my translation team that I am absent so frequently, as it makes it difficult to make good progress. But when we are actually somewhere else, I do enjoy catching up with missionary colleagues and Beninese friends, and the shopping is usually more interesting than Kandi!

What also bothers me is the way that travelling upsets our routines. Before we go away I have to spend afternoon time getting everything ready, and therefore have less time for the children, and when we get back I'm always busy unpacking and catching up on things which couldn't get done when we weren't here (usually baking).

Do our kids mind? They don't know any different of course, and they too see other friends when we travel. Eve is the one who seems least happy to be elsewhere, and most happy to get back home again, but perhaps that will change as she gets older.

Nights are also difficult when travelling at the moment. Eve wakes a couple of times a night at the best of times, but travelling makes her sleep very restless. The fact that the whole family is sharing a room just makes it worse for the rest of us! We survive, but we get home exhausted!

Some photos from our last journey to Cotonou. Firstly the auberge in Dassa where we often stop to have a drink and stretch our legs. We can also buy sandwichs to go, which we then eat later on in our journey, in the middle of nowhere! Finally, a photo as we crossed Porto-Novo, in case you got the impression we were the only ones on the road! Notice the bunch of bananas on the lap of the motorbike passenger in front of us!

Ajouter une légende

bilingual family questions part 1

Do you have any examples of miscommunication / communication breakdowns between family / compound members?

There are surprisingly few, though maybe we're used to negotiating understanding. Sometimes a Monkolé speaker will say a word, I'll say I don't understand, and they'll say it again, looking at me as if I'm mad. Eventually they'll explain that it is a French word, just pronounced in a Monkolé way. For example “essence” (petrol) becomes “sãsi”, and a Bic biro is “biki”.

Another thing which is confusing is that in Monkolé if you want to turn an affirmation into a question, instead of raising the intonation at the end as you would in English or French (“He's here?”) you drop it. Which means that, though it now comes more naturally to us, earlier in our language learning we found ourselves confusing people by raising our intonation and making them think we are affirming something when we actually wanted to ask if it were true. (Try asking this kind of question and dropping your voice to see how weird it feels at first!)

When you code-switch (= switch from one language to another), how conscious is it?

Not very conscious, in that I feel I automatically have one language “attached to” each person, so I don't think about it. I suddenly become very conscious of it if I make a mistake and use the wrong language, but that doesn't happen often. I also notice sometimes if I'm addressing several people at once and have to decide which language to use, for example if I'm saying something to the rest of the family. (Usually in that case I would use English, but occasionally French.)

Does confusion between the languages not arise and end up with languages being muddled to a degree?

This morning I was in a three-way conversation with one of my Monkolé colleagues and one of my sons. Each pair in the triangle usually uses a different language. I found myself switching between Monkolé and English depending on who I was speaking to, but then using French when it was for both.

But it never feels like languages are muddled … although perhaps to someone listening in who didn't understand all the languages it might seem that way!

Within our family we do mix languages to some extent, which I would distinguish from “muddling” them, as the latter seems to suggest to me that it is a problem or makes things confusing. There are words we always say in one language or another, but we just slot them in (with their original accent) to whichever language we are speaking. This happens most often with proper nouns, eg. “Did you go to La Franchise ?”, “Tu as fini ton Annual Review?”

Our three small try-linguals:

Even though...

... it is the driest and hottest time of year, some plants choose this time to flower! The first and second photos are of the flame tree, and the others show the flowers of the "frangipanier":

Thank you to my husband for the photos!

Hiya! Salut! Irei ì sũ ya?

This blog is called "Try-lingual in West Africa" but it's been a while since I talked about multi-lingualism. Fortunately a friend of mine has helped me with that! We were students together in our undergraduate days in York, studying Linguistics together, and she is now a lecturer at the University of York St John. She contacted me as she was teaching on bilingual families, and wanted to know if I could give some input so that her students would have a real-life example of one.

I agreed, and sent a diagramme of our communication habits – who speaks which language to whom – both within our family and also with the people who come here on a daily or regular basis (I included our translation consultant, as that added another language into the mix!). Here it is, with a brief explanation: (if you can't see the whole thing, try clicking on the image to open it up in another window)

This diagramme represents the members of our family with the people they interact with on a daily basis in our home. The basis for all these interactions is the OPOL principle – One Person One Language. Each person knows the language they use with every other person, but within the family the fact that everyone is bilingual is taken into account, so conversations fluctuate regularly between the two languages.

Marc is French, and speaks French with all members of the family.

I am English, and speak French with Marc and English with our children.

The children speak English amongst themselves, but often pepper their English with French words. (Their parents' languages show evidence of a certain amount of code-switching – going between languages – too!)

We live in a compound containing our own house, a smaller house (in which one room is used as a schoolroom for Marc to home-school the older children), and an office building where I work with a team on Bible translation.

P1-3 represent people who work on the property.

P1 represents two Bible translators who work with me in an office 50m from the house, and who come to the house for a 30-minute break every morning and often at other times. Their language use is identical to each other as regards the other people on the diagramme so they are shown as one entity.

P2 represents the woman who does the housework and looks after our youngest child while the rest of the family is out of the house in the mornings.

P3 represents a translation consultant who comes regularly to work with the Bible translation team.

The two older children have identical language use, and are only shown separately so that it is clear that they speak English to each other. Where arrows are missing, it can be assumed that the same language is used to both children, and this is true of the parents too. While the children use a different language for each parent, everyone else uses the same language for both.

(Child F is not really speaking yet, I only put an arrow towards me because she actually said, "Hello!" to me this morning!)

In future posts I will include some of the questions the students sent back after studying this information, with my replies.