Tuesday, March 14

Thanks for praying for the translation team work last week, here is Aaron's report:

 On March 9, the Lavukal Bible Translation Team gathered at Nono village in the west Russell Islands. The mission, to clean up the books of Ruth and Jonah, along with the first four chapters of Matthew, in preparations for our first ever Consultant Check. Even though no-one on the team has ever been to this part in the translation process before, attitudes were high and nerves seemed to be well under control.

 As we worked through Jonah, we began to get past the text, realizing as we looked through it again, that we have a pretty nice story! Months of hard work digging in God's word to truly understand the fullness of its meaning were paying off. I was delighted to read several passages where we intentionally put in more idiomatic Lavukaleve, so that the text does not just seem accurate, but really zings, like authentic Lavukaleve.

 Moving on to Ruth, we delighted in many of the same features we had found in Jonah. In addition, we remembered we had wanted to add some features to the text, like some section headings and possibly some pictures (like a stalk of barley and a pottery water jug) to make a few foreign concepts that much clearer.

 We worked on Matthew our final day, Saturday. Matthew was actually the book the translators worked on first. This section was started long ago, but got set aside for a while. Recently the team, Aaron especially, has felt scrambling a bit to get these chapters ready for the Consultant Check as well. Ezekiel and Simon, the drafters of Ruth and Jonah respectively, did not want Matthew (who is almost finished with the first draft!) to feel left out. One step we needed was a village comprehension check. We were not sure we had enough time to get that in before our Consult on the 20th. But Nono village came through in a big way.

 Saturday morning we were joined by four willing participants who were so excited to help that we had to set aside some of our other checking so we could do some comprehension checks with them. We had good feedback from the group and were very encouraged that this text was in good shape as well.

 So, Aaron is now busily taking all the comments and edits from this last work session, and working to get the texts ready for the Consultant Check next week.