When the translation project coordinator and I arrived at the Church in Agato, Ecuador, we saw a group of women led by one other woman. All were wearing their traditional blue clothes and golden necklaces. I have seen some of the women at the morning market. We went down the stairs to a small room. […]

A number of years ago, we needed to discover ways to expedite training and economize on travel time. One common technique was to buy all the software needed for Bible Translation here in the States and load it on a hard drive. The hard drive was brought to the field and carefully installed into a […]

My first trip out of the U.S. in my work with United Bible Societies was to Curacao. The Bible Society of Curacao was translating the Bible into the beautiful local language Papiamentu. Papiamentu is based in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. It also has some Arawak Indian and African influences. Papiamentu is one of […]

One of the most interesting lessons I have ever learned was during a trip to Vermont by car from Albany, New York. The translator consultant lived in Albany. He needed to have computer training to help people with the translation of an indigenous language in Guatemala. These people had escaped from political persecution and now […]

Continuing with the training on how to use computers to translate the Bible, I made another trip to Guatemala for the purpose of teaching the translators to use the software to help them expedite the whole process. The first thing I had noticed while traveling to the city where the translators lived was the abundance […]

Another interesting situation took place while I was taking computers to the different translation projects and training them to use the software, I took a monitor to a translation project in the North of Guatemala. The trip by bus from Ciudad de Guatemala to the remote place near the border with Mexico took about 8 […]

Translating a written text into another language requires a number of steps, and many more when it is for a minority language with a newly established orthography or alphabet and no or few previously written materials in that language. In the early days of transitioning translation projects from a purely manual process to a computer-assisted […]

In 1985, I had just started working at United Bible Societies when I was told that these missionaries working in Argentina were going to come through Miami to pick up their laptop. It was at the end of 1985 and the portable Toshiba T1100 had just come up with MS-DOS 2.1, an internal 3.5 floppy […]