Computer in the village

These days technology is making more things available, and as I have mentioned before, we have a small netbook computer and solar panels for charging it, which means that our translation team can work on typing up and editing drafts while in the village. It is more convenient than having to travel to Buka to do it, so it is a great blessing.

Here’s a photo of Ailyne using the computer to edit a draft translation.

The Anuki Team

During the translation workshop in February, I was working with the Anuki language group. Each language group sends three people to the workshop, two who work on translating and one who works on producing literacy materials, such as books for children in their language. The team that the Anuki language sends in consists of translators, Kipling and Hazel, and the literacy worker Paulus. In the picture above you can see Kipling and Hazel working on translating a passage.

Paulus joined us to check through the passage – when I did the advisor checks, he joined us and I asked him questions about the passage since he hadn't worked on it and didn't know it so intimately. We are doing an advisor check in the picture below.

Nearly every night after dinner, I went back to work with the Anuki team to finish off the day's work and I was glad when we had the occasional day that we finished everything before dinner! The days we finished earlier were the days that we only had 12 verses to translate. Other days we were working on 15-19 verses.

At the end of the workshop, we had an evaluation, and the Anuki team said that when we translated only 12 verses in a day it was not enough! I tell you what – they are so dedicated that they are happy to translate more verses and working after dinner doesn't faze them! They're just incredible!

Kipling working hard in the picture above.

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.

Socialising and working

My social life has been quite full the past eight days, from Monday to Monday (yesterday). One of my meals on each of those eight days, I ate with company. I had an American Thanksgiving lunch on Saturday with a group of friends and then leftovers with a smaller group for lunch on Sunday.

Work-wise, I've been doing a few different things: reading books about linguistics and about culture, checking linguistic papers before they go on the Internet, spending time with Rebekah and writing reports on the Teop language in Bougainville. One of those reports is about my visit there and what I observed, and the other report is a 'People Profile', which is just information about aspects of their lives and culture. You can see People Profiles for other language groups online at: www.pngbta.com/nav/projects.htm

Other work I've been doing

Since managing the kitchen does not take a lot of time, I have been doing some other jobs too while I have been here.

One was gathering information about the work that is happening here and writing it in a presentable format with photos, to make a website for internal use only. There isn't much info about Bougainville in Ukarumpa, but they need more people to come and work at Bougainville, however if there isn't anything way for people to learn about Bougainville, then it probably won't even get on their radar screen. Hopefully what I have prepared will get up and running and people in Ukarumpa will be a bit more in touch with the work in Bougainville.

Another thing that I have been doing is recording interviews with Bougainvilleans who are involved in translation here. I was asking them questions such as "Why did you get involved in Bible translation?", "How have people in the community responded when they heard God's word in their own language?" and "Why do you need a translation into the local language?" The most common response to the last question was that God's Word is so much clearer when it is in their own language.

I have started typing up some of the interviews and some of the things that the people said will probably be used to promote the work of Bible translation and get other people excited about it.

Tomorrow I am going to visit the Hakö language area and will be staying there for two nights, returning on Monday. Then I leave Buka on Wednesday, have two nights in Port Moresby and then go to Melbourne! In exactly a week I will be there. How exciting! I love it here in Bougainville too though. It's a great place and I will be sad to leave, but I am happy about visiting Melbourne too.

Work or holiday in the village?

So far I have written a lot about food and the fun things that we did in the village, but no, I didn't go there for a holiday! I did actually do work. It's just that it's not as exciting as all the other things!

Elvira and I recorded stories in the Sos Kundi language about various things and we also recorded a rough Tok Pisin translation. When we had a person with a story to tell, we would first record an introduction saying, the language, the topic, the date, who was speaking and what village they were from. Then they would tell the story and when they finished the story we would say and record, "And again in Tok Pisin", and they would tell the story again in Tok Pisin.

Here's a picture of me recording a history story from an old man:

Some of the topics that we recorded were about:
How to make sago
Our fishing trip
How to make a dugout canoe
The frog and the rat
A spider that scared us one night
What we did in a language learning session
A personal fishing experience
A sago palm that fell and landed on a man's leg
A crazy woman
Dogs, pigs and sago
Our mango that looked like betelnut

We also recorded some prayers and life stories and stories about many other things. We recorded over 40 stories. As you can see, we often recorded a story about something that had just happened and made a good story.

Sometimes we (the three of us) sat down with somebody and transcribed one of the stories we recorded. I operated the recorder, pressing play and stopping it and the native speaker repeated what they heard and Correna wrote it down. Often I had to replay sections until Correna and the native speaker had heard it well and were clear on what the recording had said.

Correna will type up the text of these stories and will be able to learn more about the language and its grammar.