A snapshot of training in Ukarumpa this month

One of the biggest areas I oversee as Director for Language Services is Academic Training. I'm thankful for an excellent team of people who coordinate our training courses. This month was a really busy one for training, and over the past couple of weeks I've spent a little time in three courses.

Epistle Workshop. Translating the New Testament is an enormous task that gets broken down into smaller projects. Some of the courses we offer at Ukarumpa are designed to help translators work through one portion of the New Testament. The Epistle Workshop that just finished included translators from seven languages, who came together to work through Galatians and Philippians. Translation is not a one-to-one, word-for-word job. In order to translate well, the translator has to know the concepts and ideas from the source text and then create a translation that clearly communicates those concepts and ideas. In the Epistle Workshop, the teacher drew from the original Greek, commentaries, and examples from other Papua New Guinean translations to go deeper into what Paul was communicating.

Hebrew 1. Students in this course are working on Old Testament translation, and basic knowledge of biblical Hebrew is an important step in understanding the source text. Course instructor and Academic Training Coordinator Phil King, in his blog, gave these four reasons to teach Papua New Guineans Hebrew:

1) English is not the source language. No matter how many times you remind people that English is not the original language of the Bible, the assumption still creeps in and influences the translation. For example, people translating from English tend to look up the meaning of the English word in their dictionaries, rather than thinking about the Hebrew original. After six weeks learning Hebrew, it’s much harder to forget.
2) To allow access to commentaries and other resources. One Papua New Guinean friend who has taken the course told me he is no longer afraid when he sees something written in Hebrew in the resource materials he uses for translation. This is an essential first step to being able to benefit from such materials.
3) Facilitating the best practice. Most Bible translators would agree that the best practice is to translate from the original language of the source materials.  When English comes in between, there is an extra level of distortion from the original message. For example, Hebrew has one main conjunction, translated in English as "and," "but," "then," "so," and so on, depending on the context. By contrast, many Papua New Guinean languages have very few conjunctions, so it is freeing to be able to translate the Hebrew rather than try to capture every distinction of the English.
4) To serve the church. We want to serve the church of PNG, and many pastors and teachers want to learn Hebrew. There are very few opportunities to do so in the country. Some of these pastors have then developed a fascination for their own languages--and an enthusiasm for translation--as they’ve learned Hebrew. They discover that English is not the definitive language for theology.

Hebrew 1 continues for a couple more weeks, with Hebrew 2 offered later this year.

Literacy, Leadership, Education and Development (LLEAD). Translating important materials in a traditionally oral-based society is useless if people aren't also learning how to read their own languages. Our limited-in-numbers staff is inadequate for teaching every individual in the country to read. Therefore, the Literacy section has designed a number of courses to train adult literacy teachers, who will multiply the training in other communities. This course, LLEAD, is the first in a set of four courses that equips participants to train others in literacy. But it goes even further than that, giving students practical methods for positive development within their communities. Our organization's vision statement says: “We desire to see Papua New Guineans knowing and living God's word, leading to changed lives and transformed communities.” The LLEAD course is a key part in realizing that vision.