Died with Anger

Every Tuesday and Thursday during the November translator training workshop, we faithfully filled the stomachs of the nine Gmz guys and then led them in a practice translation activity. Two of these evenings involved revising stories that were written for the government-run Gmz reading curriculum. Although they are written in Gmz, the dialect in which they were written is noticeably different from either of the dialects represented in our group of translation candidates. Thus, the revision process would accomplish two things. First, it would help me see the differences between the two dialects that the New Testament translation project will be trying to unite. And second, such a revision/conversion/adaptation is much the same process that we will undergo as we adapt from the New Testament text already published in a different dialect of Gmz. Little did we know, it would be really fun as well!

 

The first night of story adaptation, the three guys from Gesas were not able to come, leaving me with no one who had ever done translation work with me. “No problem,” I thought to myself, “These new guys are better educated, with better Amharic and this first story is short and rather simple,” or so I thought. As we got the re-translation underway, I noticed some confusion so I gave my usual explanations for clarification or questions for possible renderings. All of which seemed clear and rather simple, or so I thought. Little did I realize at the time: working together as a translation team is a learned skill.

 

You know a version of the story we tried. A dog tricks a quail into letting her guard down and then grabs her in his jaws and runs into the woods to eat her. When crossing a stream the quail yells out “Look there is another dog in the water.” Seeing his reflection the dog spontaneously barks and the quails flies free, laughing at the foolish dog.

 

So where did the problems lie? Everywhere! They argued for way too long on unimportant details like the exact name of the quail-like bird poorly depicted in the book’s pictures. They were very wooden in their translation from the Amharic text, insisting on individual words rather than trying to grasp and recreate the concept as a whole. They repeatedly struggled with using correct Gmz grammar, once again influenced too much by the style of Amharic. A story that would have taken less than 20 minutes with my team back in Gesas (despite their comparatively unimpressive 5^th grade educations), here took over an hour and a half with this new team.

 

The final activity of the night was the record the story which I then edited and played back for them the next morning. Overall, they seemed happy with the result as each of them burst into laughter at the final sentence literally translated: “Dog when he was tricked by the quail, his insides died with anger as he sat on the bank of the river.” Well, maybe my insides hadn’t died with anger, but for sure they were knocked unconscious by frustration that previous night. I said to myself, “Careful, Travis, it just takes time. Working as a team, working with you, working in translation. It just takes time.”