mardi 20 septembre 2016

Photos

The internet is working(ish) this evening so I thought I'd post a few photos of life here at the moment. (Note - not that well, I wasn't able to send it immediately.) Here are the kids playing with friends at the pastor's house in the village:



On our way home through the fields - Eve has managed to hitch a life!



Marc preaching in the Kandi-Fô church last Sunday:



--   Hilary DENEUFCHATEL  BP 134 Kandi  REPUBLIQUE DU BENIN  Afrique de l'Ouest/West Africa    www.try-lingual.blogspot.com  

vendredi 16 septembre 2016

A few minutes of the work of a Bible translator

A quick glimpse into my work:

I am working through our Monkolé text of 1 Chronicles, which means I
need to do lots of checking that names are the same everywhere they appear.

In 9:6 we meet a Zerahite who the NIV calls "Jeuel", and who is "Yéouel"
in the French Nouvelle Bible Segond. We transliterate names from French
into Monkolé, which means he becomes "Yeuɛli" which is fine, as that is
what I find in the Monkolé text. (And the "y" sound is used more
frequently than "dj" in Monkolé, so it's probably better with a "Y" than
a "J".)

The Word Commentary I am following tells me that Jeuel is also mentioned
in Ezra 8:13, so I open up Ezra in Monkolé to check how we've spelt it
there. Ah, but the text I'm looking at has all its special characters
"messed up" (things like the "ɛ" in "Yeuɛli"). It was typed up with
different software, and we have to do a "Search and Replace" to get them
all looking normal again.

I thought one of my translators was supposed to do that while I was in
France, so I open up my file where I noted their work. Sure enough,
Philémon should have done it, and I am fairly sure he'd told me he'd
done it, so either I haven't collected his work off the server, or he
didn't save it up to the server when he'd finished it (easily done with
the connection problems we have here).

In the copy I have on my computer the name is "Yeuli", so it could be
changed to match 1 Chronicles, although in Hebrew it is actually spelt
slightly differently. Anyway, I need to wait until I go on-line at the
end of the morning to check the Ezra file. If I modify a file which
isn't the most recent copy my software gets confused! For now I write
myself a note so that I don't forget pour Jeuel.

My commentary also says that he appears in 2 Chronicles 29:13 (I check
the Hebrew text, and it is spelt the same way as in 1 Chronicles). I
open up that file and it is spelt "Jeiɛli" (probably following a
different French translation) so I modify it to "Yeuɛli".

And it's back to 1 Chronicles 9:6 ...