"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

Some books

I'll be writing a paper soon! Of course, I'll be writing about Bible translation. What exactly about it, though, I don't know yet. But I've already gone to the library to see what types of books are available. Here's an adapted version of some of the content from the annotated bibliography I'm turning in soon:

A collection of essays by Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion professor, Harry Orlinsky's “Essays in Biblical Culture and Bible Translation” is split into three parts, the third with the most importance: “Essays in Bible Translation.” Although these essays are written in a non-Christian perspective, the Christian Bible includes the Hebrew Bible includes as well, so what Orlinsky has to say is still very relevant. Orlinksy, writing in the 1970s, argues that new translations constantly need to be made, of any sacred scriptures—whether Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic—in order to remain intelligible to audiences whose language has changed from those of the past. While making this argument, Orlinsky draws readers' attentions to a lot of the history of the translation of the Hebrew scriptures for the Jewish and the Christian faiths. So, given that there is a lot of history included, this volume is of value because it sheds light (and gives specific examples) into the practice of translation, no matter which languages are involved.

“Translation as Mission: Bible Translation in the Modern Missionary Movement” by William A. Smalley will probably be a very crucial piece of information for this research. Because this book is written in the Christian perspective—and one that it specifically focusing on translation in the missionary mind-set (not just updating and improving English translations, but into languages that have never had any part of the Bible translated into their language)—every part of it will be useful or necessary in my research because so much is covered in this book (chapter 5: Theology in Translation, chapter 8: Translation Strategy under Language Diversity, chapter 10: Translation and Indigenous Theology). Whatever topic pursued, care must be taken not to just regurgitate this book's information, but to give it relevance and channel it into specific arguments.

--kowai-kawaii