View this email in your browser

20 Feb 2020

It is very common for Donna and I to go on a walk after work. Typically we talk about our day. I guess yesterday I had a bit more to share and after a few blocks she said, "You should share that with others. I'm serious." So here is a mailchimp (email) letter about my day.

Having a similar routine for the past 25 years (that being spending the day by myself in front of a computer) makes it seem mundane and in some ways it might be... but I also get to travel the world in a virtual sense. Here goes.

The picture above shows a team in Ethiopia. I was with this team last July and have continued to work closely with the two men who are seated. Zakarias is on the left and he wants to learn how to format Bibles - so we are working on how to get him started. (putting Bibles into the final format is very complex and it will take him years to become an expert)

The picture below was taken in the Philippines a little over a year ago. For years I have worked with Sheila, who is seated in the center. She was charge of helping translation and publishing for all the work in the Philippines, which is not an easy task; there is a lot of work going on there. Sheila had been struggling with cancer the past 3 or 4 years and we received the sad news a few weeks ago that she passed away. The Bible Society wants us to visit them to give training and support to help them fill in the void she has left. Yesterday we began to make plans for their future.

Emmanuel (below, on the left) is a translator in South Sudan. He was not able to connect with other computers and thus not able to share his work with the team. He was a journalist in the past with some incredible stories. Now he is now working on the greatest story ever told.

This next picture is of Bill who is a translator in South Pacific for the Tonga people. (island nation near New Zealand) Bill is doing the final work for the Bible in Tonga and while doing the spell checking was getting error messages about normalization. He wasn't sure what to do. Yesterday I looked at their project setup and saw some problems. Today I will help them get the rules properly defined as well as help him fix some of the inconsistencies.

Last year I visited India, working with a number of projects. One translator wrote me yesterday asking about how to do parallel passage checking. This translator is from an organization other than the Bible Society. It is quite common for other organizations without a support team to struggle with even the basics. This note was a reminder for me that there are many translators who lack some of the basic training. I sent this short note.

A few other items from yesterday.:

Fausto is a consultant from the Dominican Republic and he was having trouble with software that helps translate Hebrew and Greek dictionaries. (lexicon sample below) He is working on translating this material into Spanish.
Yesterday I worked with a team in Aruba. They were having trouble with quotations marks as well as rules for numbers over 1,000. We use the comma for the separator but many languages will separate with a period 1.000 and others will put in a space, like this: 1 000. For this project if the number is even (as with 1,000 or 2,000) they do not want a space (1000) but if it is not even then they want a full stop.(1.100)
As I look at my email outbox from yesterday, I corresponded with coworkers in Rome, Toronto, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Madagascar and Great Britain.
Finally, but by no means the least significant... I went to buy Donna a birthday card yesterday. Her birthday will be on Sunday, February 23. Why do so many cards have glitter? I am still checking my hands for stray glitter.

So that was my day ... a cold day in Iowa ... February 20, 2020.