Bible Translation in PNG

More than 10% of all the world’s current human language diversity is present on the tiny island of New Guinea. Even with all of the Bible translations available in English today, there are many languages in Papua New Guinea without any translation of Scripture.

Rewind

Bible translation in Papua New Guinea has not been something new. The Nystrom family, for example, had worked with the Arop village (along the Bismark Sea) in Papua New Guinea to translate the Bible into a PNG language. That was 1988. Wycliffe released a video in 2014 on their story, which you can see at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH_ewsGlkpo.

For them toward the beginning, the challenge of using 13 people as translators seemed too much. The number was reduced to about 4 people, working along with the missionaries there. Fortunately for the Nystrom family, they had very cooperative national translators.

Working on story books also followed. But other tribes needed their own Bibles in their own languages. Could the missionaries translate in more than one language at a time? Would that be possible?

But disaster struck in 1998 after an earthquake hit. A tsunami followed.

How do you cope with such a tragedy? What do you say to those who remain?

Fast forward

These sorts of questions still face missionaries, even in more recent years. As of 2014, there were still many PNG languages that do not have any version of the Bible–or practically any literature, for that matter. The occasional tragedy strikes.

As the new year starts, new challenges await. New opportunities become available. Missionaries return to the field. People lend in support through missions trips. New computer technology makes translation easier. Random people you’ve never met donate funds to springboard a new vision.

For the Nystrom family and those who followed, the resulting Aitape West Translation Project has brought several nationals together, as well as missionaries, to translate the Bible into a number of Papua New Guinean languages.

Although my upcoming book is not about the Nystrom family and their work, the experience of the Nystrom family is by no means the only PNG missionary story worth telling. Nor is it the only one involving Bible translation for a people who formerly never had the Word of God in their own language.

As a writer, I am looking forward to what 2015 holds in store for the characters in the book. Will 2015 be a miracle year?

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For an example of another group reaching Bible-less peoples with translation efforts, see http://blog.wycliffe.org/2014/12/31/the-bigger-picture/.

Capturing a Photo: The Good, The Bad, and the Very Unexpected

That elusive bird… so elusive to get a copyright free pic of it. Should I just rely on National Geographic and pay (God knows) what they would charge?

Middle to Late 2014. My dad wanted to visit the zoo. The Louisville Zoo had some new insect promotion, in which it had large statues and such of different kinds of insects–great photo opportunity, that sort of thing.

I had in late 2013 acquired a brand new camera. Since this would be an opportunity to use my Canon Rebel T3 semi-professional camera at the zoo for the first time, I decided I might as well bring that along.

The ducks were nice. The elephants were elegant–well, as much as they can be. The bats were vampirish. The polar bear was boss, walking around in a circle like some fashion model strutting her designer clothing.

But in all this, I was taking pictures of birds. Yes, birds. Having done some research on Papua New Guinean birds that summer, I had noticed that the zoo had some tropical birds of the South Pacific variety.

One of the birds they had was “a dime a dozen,” as the saying goes. The Papua New Guinean “crowned pigeon.” (No, it doesn’t look like a western pigeon. It just acts like one.)

But the Victoria Crowned Pigeon was not the prize, though I got a decent picture of that. But I had already had a good picture of that from someone who had visited Papua New Guinea back in 2010.

The prize was a bird of paradise. A crowing, snapping small bird, distinguishable from a blackbird or crow by its feather colors and disco dancing moves. The Louisville Zoo had claimed to have a magnificent bird of paradise on display there.

After visiting the zoo and reviewing the photos, I found one picture that might have had it on there.

Fortunately for me, one of those Papua New Guinean missionaries just so happened to be at my home church in the following few days after my family visit to the zoo. So, while the picture was still on my SD card in my camera, I used the viewfinder to show him the picture.

From what he could see, he confirmed to me that he believed it was a bird of paradise. I value his opinion because I knew he had seen a bird of paradise before. (Some missionaries to PNG or missionary kids even, have not seen a bird of paradise live in the wild. In other words, they haven’t seen anything that you cannot find from watching National Geographic–maybe even less than that.)

Still though, I thought it might be wise to try to compare the bird in the photograph I took with actual birds of paradise that had been documented and photographed.

The result was….peculiar to say the least.

At first glance, the bird in the picture looked like a 12-wired bird of paradise. The yellow feathers underneath. The dark feathers over top. But then I looked at the eye color. White. Wait a second, wasn’t the eye color for a male 12-wired bird of paradise supposed to be pinkish? What’s going on here?

And what about the feet? Weren’t they supposed to be pink as well? Why were they seemingly out of pigment–white or grayish? Was it the lighting in the zoo? Was this some sort of partial albino bird of paradise? Could it be that this bird of paradise is only half bird of paradise and half something else? Could it be a mix of two birds of paradise?

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology had videos as well as National Geographic on many of these birds of paradise, which come in an undetermined variety. (Some counts differ from others. Cornell gives 39.) However, they were not conclusive either in helping me determine what sort of bird this was in my photo.

All this sent me into an online search for pigmentation in bird eyes, which led me to inconclusive results. What bird of paradise had white in its eyes, like a human being? Australian crows, if I’m to believe the reports of some, have such eyes. After further research, I found that there is a white-eyed “family” (I use that term loosely here) of birds that are native to the Indian ocean and South Pacific. Is this bird I photographed an offspring of a bird of paradise and an Australian Crow? A bird of paradise and one of the tropical white-eyed birds? But isn’t the whiteness of those tropical birds from their feathers?

I tried to do online searches for birds with the precise characteristics that I had seen for the bird in my photo. Alas, however, I found no matches! Sure, it would help maybe if I knew other characteristics of this zoo-kept bird. Maybe I should try the Louisville Zoo’s own online records? Well, they didn’t have the kind of detail about the bird that I had wanted to find. Could I have mistaken this bird I photographed with a different bird that the zoo had? No other birds on record seemed to match the one I had photographed either!

And what about this label “Magnificent Bird of Paradise”? That’s supposed to be a designation for an actual type of bird of paradise. Too many searches online came up with the “Superb” Bird of Paradise, which is a different bird of paradise with a color that my photographed bird did not have.

Time to return to the Cornell videos and see if I missed something. No, the Magnificent Bird of Paradise appears to have yellow feathers on the top part of the wing, not below the wings. But on the positive side, the feet of the bird aren’t pink but rather, some color very close to what my photographed bird has.

Could the photographed bird be a mix of the 12-wired and Magnificent Bird of Paradise? Could the differences in color of feathers be accounted for some other way, namely, as one stage in a “molting” process before the bird reaches its final color form? The American Goldfinch and many other birds have some variety in feather color from one type of molt to the other, as Cornell has noted. Large parrots reportedly molt about once per year. Why not other tropical birds like a bird of paradise? The bird was too vibrant in color to have been a female, at least in some bird of paradise varieties.

There are some birds that I can safely rule out as possibilities for this bird’s origin, assuming that the Louisville Zoo wasn’t fooled by someone offering a fake bird to the institution. Under that assumption…I can rule out virtually all North American birds; I think I can rule out crows as sole ancestors for the bird. The bird seems at least partly legit. Should I just trust the missionary’s word?

Well, hopefully the picture will end up in the book, unless a better usable one turns up, or unless the bird I photographed turns out to be a fake. Out of all the pictures from missionary kids that I have, and of all the pictures of those who went on missions trips to PNG, I found no birds of paradise.

Blue feathers on the top of the wings. Dark green feathers at the top of the head. Yellow feathers on the bird’s underside (but not on the underside of the wings). White or gray feet. Whites in the eyes. Definitely tropical if real.

This ranks as one of the most intriguing research projects I’ve ever done. If no solution can be found, what am I going to tell a future publisher?

Partial Gloss Bibliography:

BirdChannel. “Molting.” I-5 Publishing. 2014. http://www.birdchannel.com/bird-health/molting.aspx. Accessed 28 Dec. 2014. Web.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Various Videos (see YouTube).

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Plumage Versions.” All About Birds. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/studying/feathers/plumagev/document_view. Accessed 28 Dec. 2014. Web.

National Geographic. Various Videos (see YouTube).

What’s Ahead

October. Change is in the air: the leaves fall from the trees; the skunks shy away from car headlights at night; people put up homes for sale and try to move on to the next stage in their lives.

The key to real estate, as it has been said, is location, location, location.

Well, for me as a writer, the key is ideas, ideas, ideas. In the process of creating this new book, I have been gradually accumulating ideas on how to make it better.

What ideas?

A poem at the beginning of each chapter. At least one quote at the beginning of each chapter, relevant to the chapter’s content. A timeline of some significant events. And maybe even a brief translation of a well known passage, but in a language you might not expect.

But the next idea I have been thinking about for a long time now. In doing the research and coming upon many photos related to the book’s events, it became apparent that I wanted to include too many photos for any publisher to agree to put in a print book over 300 pages long.

(Oh, was that news to you? The book is going to be over 300 pages long.)

So the question arose, “What am I going to do with all of those pictures?”

Decisions, decisions.

Well, before this year is up, I hope to have an answer to that question.

In the meantime, stay on the look out.

Moving Forward

“Hmm… honey, is this non-fiction, or fiction? I don’t know. Maybe the bookstore made a mistake.”

 

Pause. Rewind. Fast forward. Jumping around and around the book’s contents, editing and fact-checking.

Perhaps some would wonder why I am doing this. The book idea has lingered in the back of my mind since 2006 or 2007.

Now, I’ve had a tendency toward writing for almost as long as I can remember, from my early elementary school poem “What Is White?” (published in Poetry 101 in 2010 under my pseudonym “Snowflake”) to that novel I never published because it was more of a way to cope with life.

The tendency for authors in the modern day is supposed to be to write a new book every two or three years. So why then is it going to take me at least five?

I didn’t originally intend it to be this way. The pesky bachelor’s degree got in the way!

Okay, okay. I had to change gears. And the degree was in a related field––Journalism and Mass Communication.

Any who, while at college earning that degree, I became known as a research guy. For the university’s campus media, I researched public domain cartoons, and, to my delight, had discovered that some Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons were already public domain. My class notes were so copious that they struck a cord of horror in one of my classmates who happened to glance on two pages of notes. My surveys for campus media earned me the Mad Researcher certificate.

Oh, and I should probably mention something about Facebook forums, and being a part of several of them. The wide variety of topics helped me expand my research as well. You end up learning that places like JSTOR and Archive.org are our friends, not to mention PLoS ONE, ScienceDaily, and a host of other sites.

But for the research behind the book in question– –the one I’d like to release sometime 2015 – –I learned that places like webcitation.org and blogs on life in the bush (no relation to George W. Bush) could be of help.

 

News websites. Interviews. Audio recordings.

Facebook messages. Twitter tweets. Electronic letters.

Yearbooks. Photos. Videos, online and on disk.

Blogs. Emails. My previously written works.

Oh, and a school newspaper.

 

All of the above in bold dark red italic I have drawn upon in the development of this upcoming book.

My goal? To make the non-fiction book appear to be fiction.

What do I mean by that?

Something a little like this blog post, actually.

Engaging. Filled with details. Impressionary language. The truth is the limit.

The title? As of this blog post, I’d rather not divulge that information. Let’s just say I could imagine an inspirational novel having this title. Lord and publisher willing, I would even prefer that the photo credits come as end notes in the end of the book, so that the body of the book appears more like a novel.

Now it’s time to go back to the drawing board, one byte at a time.

And yes, for all of you who have seen the Out of Print documentary, as of this writing, there’s still such a thing as bookstores.

In the Works

Graduation. The last cigar. The final countdown. The end of the line.

Now what?

Rewind a bit.

Several years ago, before this whole “college thing,” I had an idea for a publication. Something to intrigue. However, I felt that it was not the right time to move forward. So I put my many notes on the shelf, so to speak.

About a year prior to graduation, someone in the Christian apologetics community posted a link on Facebook to something called the Aikman Opportunity Award. This award would be given to a contest winner who had a book idea worth selling.

The criteria of the content of the book got me thinking. Wait a second, I have a story to share like that!

Out of the almost 90 entries to the contest, I did not win. But the challenge did give me a chance to practice my magazine writing skills again, as well as to get some story clarifications.

The cat was out of the bag. Schrödinger’s cat was alive and well.

Slowly, I was telling more people about my book plans.

An inspiring real story set mostly in a far away land.

 

Photo Credit: Sarah Woodard

Now what? Now to put the pieces together.

Summer 2013. I had the opportunity to interview two of the characters to be in the book. From my perspective learning radio and television interviews, I knew this interview would be different. The topic questions were varied and designed to fill in the gaps I felt needed to be filled.

After the interview and its recordings were done, I examined the info and gradually incorporated it into the digital manuscript.

Filling in some gaps? Yep, and giving a more in-depth first chapter as well.

But what about summer 2014? As it just so happened, on Facebook I read a couple of messages from yet another character in the planned book.

Beforehand, I had no idea when next he would be returning to the states. Interestingly, he stated he would be returning to my hometown, if all went as planned, just a day before I would return there from college out-of-state.

Graduation.

Time to get back to the drawing board.

Speaking of pictures, during that last year studying in South Carolina, something else dawned on me. I had two college connections of people who had lived in the very country that I was writing about in the book.

Perhaps they would have some photos?

Hundreds of photos later, I’d say that was a yes. All except for a particular elusive bird. Apparently, humans aren’t the only ones demanding their privacy rights.

So where am I in the process now? Verifying what I already have. Looking up more details. Thinking about interviewing more people. Grinning from ear to ear.

Oh, what’s the book about? That’s for me to know, and eventually you to find out.