Today's exciting adventure!

We had a busy adventurous day today. First we hiked to a nice waterfall and then we went to a beach and went snorkelling. There is an Australian family (all adults) on holiday staying in the same unit as we are staying in on the weekends and they had the plans to do this trip and invited us to join them.

We drove to a place where we would start hiking to the waterfall. We had three local men who volunteered to be our guides. It was quite the hike! Lots of slippery rocks and tree roots. We were all so hot from hiking uphill. I wonder how this hike we did today compares with the Kokoda Trail – a lot shorter obviously, but in terms of difficulty, I'm sure it must be up there with it!

Here's a photo of us at a pretty easy part of the hike.

We were all very hot from hiking uphill so it was a relief to get to the amazing waterfall at the end of it and have a swim in the cool water.

After that we drove for an hour or so and went snorkelling at a place called East Cape and I saw lots of pretty fish. We saw a sailing canoe that had a blue tarp as its sail!

Here we are on a pier at another place.

It was a good, fun day, although now I have sore muscles from the hiking!

More of our translation process

Continuing from the last post, after they check the passage and make the changes, we put the text into a special program called Adapt-It and the translators tell the program which English words go with the words from their language.

I take the word for word translation and compare it with an English Bible to check that everything's there and how it should be, and I prepare some questions to ask in an advisor check later. The questions vary from comprehension questions, to checking out the deeper meaning of a particular word.

Each language group sends three people to the workshop, two to do translation, and one to prepare literacy materials. When it is time to do an advisor check on the passage, we ask the questions to the literacy person, since he/she hasn't worked on the passage and doesn't know it in depth like the translators. He/she doesn't necessarily know what it is supposed to say, so if there are problems with the passage, they may become apparent.

After the advisor check, we put any changes into the computer. Later we will print a booklet of everything they translated at this workshop and they language groups will take the booklets to the village and check them with the community, asking comprehension questions. Later on there will be another check with a person who is experienced in translation and has been trained to do final checks, known as 'consultant checks'.

Usually I work with the Anuki people until about 5pm and then we come back again after dinner and work for another hour or so. That helps us to keep up with the work. We get everything for that day finished so then we don't fall behind.

The daily work

I have been really busy during the week with the translation workshop. I wake up at 6am and have a cold shower, which I really don't like. All the staff meet together at 7.45am to pray and then at 8am, all the participants come.

We have devotions first and then a half hour training session, in which Rebekah is teaching about music and the church. In a couple of weeks the participants will be working on writing songs.

We have breakfast at 9am and dinner at 5.30pm and these are big meals. There is usually rice, stew, sweet potato, pumpkin, taro, bananas and leafy greens at these meals. At lunch time, it is a smaller meal, either some savoury cracker biscuits, or a cake.

After breakfast we start looking at the passage for the day, reading through it in a few different English translations and discussing things that could be issues. Then the groups start translating the passage and this takes several hours. Once they finish, we print their first draft out and they read through it to check that it sounds natural and they also check the accuracy of the translation and mark the paper with changes. Then they input the changes on the computer.

The work is not finished there though! There is still more work to be done on the passage and I'll write more about that in my next blog post.