What's a wedding?

The Plain English Version is being translated primarily for people who speak an Aboriginal language as their mother tongue. Dave did a presentation recently explaining how the translation works - see below for a couple of examples. One of the most important steps in the translation process is taking the translation to people from our target audience, to check if everything is understood, and understood correctly. If anything has no meaning, it's not much use, and if it has the wrong meaning, it could be dangerous!

One afternoon, Dave and I visited a family from Maningrida (where Dave worked for many years) to do some testing. A 14 year old girl was home and she was happy to do some work with us. One of the words that we found wasn't understood was 'wedding'. She had heard of the word, but couldn't remember what it meant. This wasn't too surprising when I realised I hadn't heard of any traditional wedding celebrations amongst Aboriginal people. While church weddings have been introduced in some areas, they are certainly not the norm. It's a bit more like when Isaac and Rebekah got married - all the right people agreed to it, then "Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her" (Gen 24:67).

Working with Dave Glasgow