It was a challenging two weeks of Team Translation Workshop, starting with equipment issues (note the double headphones I’m wearing – because the microphone on the first set died early on).
But the greatest challenge was keeping up the pace. We jokingly compared it to being in a footrace with a train. Although we started with a mile of head start, we knew that train was going to catch us soon and run us right over!
It was a two-week workshop, but many of the attendees would only be attending the first week to learn some basic translation principles. The second week was for the teams actually doing a tribal language Bible translation or preparing to do one.
The majority of the Spanish-speaking participants were still candidates in training, but one Venezuelan missionary (Richard) and two Mexicans hung with us through the entire workshop. Miguel Angel is learning the Trique language (8 tones – extremely difficult) and Ramón (red shirt in the middle of the group picture) is planning to enter a tribal ministry soon.
As you can see by cllicking on this picture, we projected the Spanish powerpoints side-by-side with the English. There were 25 presentations scheduled for the first week. My teammate, Duff Gustafson, and I arrived in Chihuahua with 11 of them translated and worked the whole time (racing the train) trying to stay ahead. We even had Israel Gualtero in Colombia working on them. We came very close to achieving our goal of translating all the powerpoints for the first week. In the very last session of the 6th day, however, Jill Goring (the workshop leader) caught up with us and passed us up.
For the second week, we just translated key slides, but it still kept us working late every evening.
The pace of oral presentation in the sessions was so accelerated that it was a challenge to keep up with the simultaneous verbal interpretation. Duff and I tag-teamed the interpreting, but I’m afraid that some of the content did not come through in Spanish.
We can take a small measure of comfort from the fact that the English speakers reported having trouble absorbing much of it themselves because of the very technical nature of the material and the heavy information load. Our Latin co-workers were very kind, however, and expressed their gratitude for our work on their behalf.
Thank you for upholding us in prayer, we really needed it! Please keep praying that the Bible translations produced by these teams would speak the heart languages of the tribal people they serve in Christ’s name.
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