Scrabble-icious

Thursday's game of Scrabble featuring scores of 353 against 298. Pretty epic.

What's been making the news in December:

Over the past month or so there have been a number of articles on the internet about Bible translation. Here are links to all the ones that I have come across.

The Bible should be available to read in every Christian's native language

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/dec/20/bible-translation-ivorian-village

Here is a comment piece written by the Director of Wycliffe Bible Translators UK. It's a good introduction to the issues and arguments for Bible translation.

The Bible Society of the West Indies translated the Bible into Jamaican patois. But traditionalists on the island have accused them of dumbing-down the scriptures. The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott reports, the project has awakened fierce controversy over the role Patois should play in Jamaican national identity.

Radio article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9663000/9663844.stm
Print article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16285462

It seems to me that the question here is not so much whether the finished Bible is more understandable, but whether Scripture is too 'holy' for some languages. Translating the Bible into certain dialects in Britain would probably get similar responses, perhaps because we would say Jesus would never have put a glottal stop in place of a 't' - he was perfect in every way, even in pronunciation.

Zambian farmers learn to write their Shanjo language

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15562729

For the first time stories passed down through the generations by word of mouth are being written down.

In the first exercise undertaken by the Shanjo translators, they were asked to use the Latin alphabet to write out advice on the benefits of training oxen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15584923

It was wonderful to come into the office a few weeks ago and see this article on the BBC News Website. I first met James Lucas in 2006 when he was taking some training in Language and Culture Acquisition. It's exciting to see how the language that is perhaps perceived as having held them back is becoming a tool to wider development. I think of a Shanjo farmer trying to comprehend the number of people who have read this article about his language, a language that few people in Zambia may even be aware of. And in the future, maybe that farmer's children will be able to begin school in the Shanjo language, learning to speak the national language through their mother tongue, going on to be successful and break out of poverty without needing to turn their back on their cultural identity.