Crash and Burn...Rookie

Well, Tuesday afternoon gave me my first crack at real translation and as I think back on it, I can’t help but smile at how it all unfolded.

 

Let me give you some background. Our co-worker here (we’ll call him Larry) is involved in two projects: he is involved in planting and providing support for the Gmz churches while at the same time, running a private school for the Gmz. In addition to his primary school in the mornings, he also sponsors Gmz people who want to participate in the Mandela Distance Education Program (I’m not sure of its actual title. This program allows for people to complete grades 5, 6, 7 and 8 long-distance (kinda like an internet course without the internet)). Anyway, the Mandela tuition costs 250 birr (about $15), which most Gmz are unable to pay. So, Larry offers to pay their registration fee in exchange for “X” number of hours of work throughout the semester. What type of work? Well, maybe cutting grass or building a fence, or painting. But, shhh…, the inside scoop is that Larry doesn’t really have enough work to fill the hours that these Mandela students “owe” him.

 

Another important aspect of this story is that on Friday afternoons, Larry is holding an evangelism training class with about a dozen of the Gmz church members. The major goal of this training is to teach them a series of stories which chronologically tell the story of the Bible (ie. the Gospel), which they can then share from village to village. These stories had been roughly translated into Gmz by one of Larry’s staff (a non-Gmz person), but when I came across one and tested it with my Gmz language teachers, I found it riddled with ambiguity and down-right errors. Bringing this to Larry’s attention (keep in mind that Larry doesn’t know much of the Gmz language), he immediately saw the need to have these stories tested and revised by actual Gmz people before teaching them to the evangelism class. But, then wait a second, Larry had a thought. Seven of the nine Mandela students who owe Larry work time are also involved in the evangelism training! Why not use them as story checkers and editors, which will, at the same time, give them a great start on learning the stories! Good idea? Some would say Larry is brilliant…well, at least Larry would.

 

Ok, so Larry came to me asking how to set his guys up to check these stories and I turned the tables on him by asking if I could work WITH them. After all, what better way to learn Gmz than to lead these guys in the revision process, not to mention helping me get some translation experience before we jump into actual Scripture translation? So, it was a win, win situation…at least until I showed up on Day 1.

 

Here’s where the fun began. During the course of introductions and an explanation of the work we were to be doing, I could tell that I was in trouble because I seemed to have left my Amharic at home. By that I mean, my Amharic was lousy, which, for some reason, is not uncommon when speaking with Gmz people (most of whom also have lousy Amharic). So, finally we jumped into the work. Now, looking back, my first mistake was to listen to advice from “The Sound of Music,” for in this case, “the beginning” is a very BAD place to start! I was given the story set for the New Testament which began with “The Announcement of John’s Birth.” Had I read through the story before coming, I may have chosen to start elsewhere. But I didn’t. The first line of the story should have been simple. It read “This is the story of the announcement of John’s birth.” After about 15 minutes of pressing these guys for the word “announcement” in Gmz, I realized something: The word “announcement” and the word for “story” are not exactly, but virtually identical. So, it was confusing to start off “this is the declaration of the declaration of John’s birth.” More work was needed on this but having already burned a lot of time on it, I decided to go to the next sentence: “Over 400 years after the time of Malachi, the people of Israel had become many.”

 

Now, I knew how to say “after 400 years” and “after Malachi lived,” but I had never tried to say both in one “after” clause. The rough draft translation was not clear so I attempted a few different constructions and each time was met with their disapproval. They weren’t understanding what I was doing so I switched to something within their culture. Right now is harvest time for the small millet (taak’a).  So, they cut their taak’a and then put it on a platform (daanza) in the sun for drying. After a month of drying, they thresh it. So, I presented them with this idea, “one month after building the daanza, the taak’a is threshed.” Understanding the situation better, they gave me their answer “we say, ‘the daanza is built, after one month the taak’a is threshed.’” Ok, that makes sense, but you made two full sentences, can’t it be done in one? Again I attempted what I thought should be close, but with no success. They kept changing it to the two sentences, as before. Why not just go with two sentences? Well, in our story, this clause is really just a time stamp. If we started the story with “Malachi lived/lives,” then we are putting him into focus when he really is not AT ALL a character in this story. To a culture with zero Bible background literacy, such a move would be VERY confusing. Instead, the point of this time stamp is to say that God had not spoken through a prophet in over 400 years, but before making a major revision like that, I would need to talk with Larry. Besides, I had already spent more than 30 minutes on all of this, I decided that we should once again skip to the next sentence.

 

Grabbing my paper, I quickly checked the clock: 4:55pm. Five minutes remained. Could we at least have one sentence to show for Day 1? So I hoped. My first attempt at translation had already crashed into failure, but reading the next sentence in the story was equivalent to it bursting into flames! It read, “There were so many Levites that they had to cast lots to decide who would go into the Temple to burn incense.” Levites? Casting lots? Temple? Burning incense? I looked up at the thoroughly unimpressed students, smiled and said, “Oh look at the time, we’ll pick up again tomorrow.” Although my insides were all knotted up with frustration, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the last hour. “Hang in there, rookie!”