News

Review of a TIPs presentation at the 2019 conference of the American Translators Association in Source (quarterly publication of the ATA’s Literary Division), Spring 2020.

At the FIT (International Federation of Translators and Interpreters) conference I had the chance to present a tool I’ve been working on for some time, and I’d like to introduce it here as well. But let’s start at the beginning.

As translators, we’re fascinated by languages, so it’s not hard to convince ourselves that the survival of indigenous languages is important. I also don’t have to repeat the dire statistics concerning the rapid loss of languages that we are experiencing. We know about this, and we care — even though we sometimes feel helpless in responding to the problem. How, though, do we communicate that urgency to others, or how do we at least awaken some interest in the rest of the world?

For about three years I have been working on a tool which I think has the potential to make that possible. It can change the conversation about why everyone should care about indigenous languages and their plight from ‘because it’s the right thing to do’ to if you don’t, you personally will lose out.’

See the rest of the article from the ITI Bulletin right here.

“One of the great blessings of being involved in Bible translation is that you get to wrestle with expressing God’s word in other languages and as you do, you begin to see things clearly that were, up till that point, somewhat opaque. Of course, not everyone can be a Bible translator, but thanks to a new website: Translation Insights and Perspectives those who aren’t involved in translation have access to insights from all sorts of languages.”

Read more from this review right here.

“The vision of the Translation Insights and Perspectives website was to build something to help Christians around the world understand the value of Bible translation, and also expand their horizons about the biblical text. It does this by exposing them to the different ways other languages express certain concepts in the Bible. Put simply, it curates insights and perspectives about the Bible, gleaned from hundreds of languages and translation projects.”

Read more from this interview about the Translation Insights & Perspectives tool right here.

English translations may approach a Bible verse or book in radically different ways—within certain parameters, that is — the parameters set by the English language. And that’s true for any language. While almost everything that is expressible through language can be expressed in any language, it simply won’t be.

Confused yet?

Let me explain with a simple but—when it comes to English and most other languages—oh-so-complex example.

It’s about pronouns.

See the rest of this in the new blog post in Patheos right here.