Words words words

One of the helpful tools in the Paratext software we use for translation is the Word List. This gives all the words in a project - in our case all the words in one book of the Bible - in alphabetical order. I pride myself on being pretty good at proof-reading, even in Monkolé, but sometimes my brain is my worst enemy. When we read, our brains deliberately don't look at every detail, they make sense of what they see. So after proof-reading I always use the word list for another check. And I may see something like this:



There are 28 instances of the word "inaabo", which means female (usually found in "ama inaabo", "daughter"), and - oops - two instances of "inaaabo", a spelling mistake! One of our team doesn't touch-type, which makes this kind of typo easier to make, and when re-reading, our brains very easily slide over an extra "a" when there are already two in the word!

In case you're wondering, "inaaboi" is "female" with a possessif marker, ie. "female of", usually found in "ama inaaboi", "daughter of". And then "[ama] inaabou" is "the daughter" and "[ama] inaaboɛ" is his/her/your daughter", depending on the context.

Anyway, thanks to the word list I removed the extra "a" from the two instances of "inaaabo", and was able to correct many other such similar errors.

If you can read the bottom line in my photo, you might be interested to know that "woo ce alisi inaabo" means "sorceress"!