Lingala

Hello! Spring break is over... back to work!

...work on... what?

I dunno!

Anyway, you know what I found last Saturday? Poking around once more at The Talking Bible blog led me to the Talking Bibles website which led me to Audio Scriptures. At Audio Scriptures, I can listen to the recordings of the Bible online for free! I might sound like some type of advertisement, but honestly, I love this website! As a linguistics major, I love languages, and so I love hearing the sounds that people make in different languages that speakers of English couldn't possibly try to pronounce--I just like hearing different things!

But let's not forget that these languages available for a little look-see (hear-listen?) at this website are more than just exotic sounds. Take Lingala for example. Heard of it? I've never heard of it. Not until I saw it on this website. So what do I do? I click on it to hear it. What do I hear? Something African.

"Something African."?! Pardon me, I'm Asian-American (Taiwanese to be exact!), so the only non-Western European languages my ears are familiar with are the East Asian ones. But still, I can't just write off a language that people think, feel, argue, forgive, honor, encourage in as "something African." So now what do I do?

What does any curious college kid do? Why, they look it up on Wikipedia! So what does Wikipedia say?

Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) and a large part of the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), as well as to some degree in Angola and the Central African Republic. It has over 10 million speakers.

Shnikies! Over ten million people speak this language, and I've never even heard of it! People in four countries speak this language, and I've never even heard of it! The official language of two countries, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo (did you even know there were two Congos?), and I've never even heard of it! About eight million people live in New York City while more than twelve million people live in Tokyo. This many people, and we probably just write them off as "something African." That doesn't sound right.

And yet, the reason I only heard about this language and its "over 10 million speakers" is because I wanted to hear some exotic sounds. That in itself doesn't sound quite right either. So you know what I really like about Audio Scriptures? It acquaints me with a part of the world I was earlier ignorant of. It isn't right just listening to sounds, so I look up the language, then its speakers, then their countries... And now what? I can pray for them.

Joshua Project is a site I like to use for more detailed information. It's a website that compiles information about different people groups. So looking at the Joshua Project website, I learn that the Lingala of DRC are already primarily Christian. The church is already fairly widespread and established, so when I pray, I can praise God for this!

See? Isn't the internet good and fun? You should try it. And as I sign off--let me leave you with a view of a beautiful page of the Bible in Lingala...


--kowai-kawaii

Narrowing it down...

I've been thinking about this paper I'm writing for a class--the one whose annotations I've been posting on this blog. Bible translation is a big topic. I don't really even know where to start. I mean, some people just like to debate the pros and cons of specific English translations and "necessary" revisions. I don't want to do that. There's a enough about all that. I say--why worry about English, when languages we've never even heard of, languages we couldn't possibly pronounce, haven't even heard of God and the Bible? The fifteen plus 20th and 21st century versions of the Protestant Bible in English now seem quite frivolous to me. Okay. Thoughts are too negative. Stop that!

But translation as a goal for missions--it seems kind of narrow. I'm pretty sure there aren't a lot of information and academic resources out there. Oh, no doubt there are spiritual/theological/pastoral writings on it. But academically... Why would there be a lot of information on it? I don't think it's a topic that typical academics ponder often.

I've been thinking a lot about the cultures. Our differences. Not just the more surface, social things, but the things that run the deepest--our values. How do our differences complicate translation? I've also been thinking a little bit about history. How does history (past translation and mission projects and imperialism/colonization) play a roll in current efforts? But more practically, how has the process of translation changed? Do these changes equal bigger success? Just some thoughts to chew on. Definitely not yet as well thought-out I would like to be.

--kowai-kawaii

"Flakes of info and fun!"

That's how I'd try, in my corny way, to promote Pageflakes. It's a start page similar to iGoogle or Netvibes. The idea is that you can put a whole bunch of things (ie, widgets/flakes) that you like all together on a page, or a tab. You could have a very basic "home" start page, with your email, a game that you always play, the weather, a calendar, and some RSS feeds. You can also have more specialized tabs--ones devoted to music, sports, science, etc. Then if you really want to, you can also publish this particular tab into a "pagecast" and other people can see it and use it too. It's a great way to share information, and so--I've made one!

Make your way on over, or just read my little summary of it here:

I've tried to keep it organized. On the right are RSS feeds to blogs I like to keep up with. Many are included in my blogroll. I'll need to update my blogroll. One of them is this blog you are now currently reading. (On a side note, a cool thing aboutPageflakes is that you can click a button and view a pagecast as if it were an RSS reader.)

To the left, under the introduction are two search engines (already loaded with search words) to keep us updated on current, related pieces of news and blog entries. And remember Maigemu? I've bookmarked his "mission" tags. I've also shamelessly bookmarked my own Diigo bookmarks.

And here's something juicy--the annotated bibliography I've been giving sneak peeks to! It's done really techno-savvily with Zotero, a source-bookmarking add-on to Firefox, and Citeline, an online tool that automatically types up bibliographies for you, made by those geniuses at MIT. It's okay if this isn't your favorite part of the pagecast, though. I understand if it's a bit dry.

Next, some websites for getting involved... All three of these websites are sites of organizations founded by a man named Cameron Townsend. The first is Wycliffe Bible Translators, an organization I've mentioned before. They are a mission organization aiming to send people out to translate Bibles. Besides actual Bible translators, included in the work force (partially through the closely related Wycliffe Associates) are language surveyors, literacy specialists, teachers for the kids of missionaries, even librarians, and many many more.

They work very closely with JAARS, of whose site I've included as third in the pagecast. JAARS is an organization aiming to aid missionaries in other, more specialized and technical ways (eg, radio transmission, aviation, information technology, contsuction).

The second website included (yes, I understand I'm explaining out of order) is OneStory. OneStory aims to make voice recordings of Bible stories for oral-based cultures. It's a great step toward actual Bible translation.

And the last little bit of this pagecast, tacked onto the right column under the RSS feeds are two websites full of great linguistic information--SIL International and its publication, the Ethnologue, a collection of the world's languages.

And.. that concludes my pagecast! I hope you have fun using the pagecast and looking at all the things I like to look at!

--kowai-kawaii

edit: I've updated and changed the pageflake a little bit, so it currently is a bit different than what I've written about here... And I'm sure it will continue to change, too, so just go there and check it out! :)

màs libros para ti...

Continuing my currently rather aimless research/source-browsing, here are some more sources I've found that might be of interest to you:

Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, edited by Brian Stanley, is a collection of articles on the history of Christian missions. Of interest is the article by Derek Peterson, "The Rhetoric of the Word: Bible Translation and Mau Mau in Colonial Central Kenya." Peterson argues that the Gikuyu in colonial Kenya used Bible translation as a way to comment on morals associated with political and economic change. This article looks past Bible translation itself (the theories, the goals, etc.) and analyzes a specific language being translated. Not only that--it goes beyond the processes and difficulties involved, and looks beyond at other possible motivations, beside missionary-work, involved. This brings to light a facet of the realm of Bible translation, one that, whether unintended or not, still nonetheless exists--politicizing religion. This article could either be too specific, or could be a jumping off point for more directed research.

Customs and Cultures, by Eugene Nida, is a volume of anthropology for those interested in Christian missions. Nida writes on many topics (race, religion in the world, technology/medicine, cross-cultural social interaction) but of course the most useful is the section on language. Though a somewhat older source, with some now commonly disregarded notions (regarding race, for example) and now frowned upon terms used to describe people ("the heathen"), this book is written in an easy-to-read style that makes for clarity for the lay person. It's chock-full of specific, humorous examples of translations gone bad. Whether or not all of these examples will be of use is another matter, but the mistakes they illustrate could be worth noting.

Some other sources:
Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference by Lawrence Venuti
Translating the Bible: An Unending Task by Keith Crim

--kowai-kawaii