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The other day at lunchtime we were talking about words (a fairly common occurrence) and my colleague told us that "go" in Yolngu Matha means "come". Since people often switch between English and Yolngu Matha when speaking with her, it can be rather confusing!
I was also confused recently when working with an Indian team, until I found out that they use "keep" in English to mean "give" or "put"! I was checking their translation of Exodus 18-19 as part of my training to do the final check of other translations. They had written it out in English to show me how they'd translated it, but I thought there must be something wrong here:
... Moses kept all those words near them which Yahowa commanded to Moses ... (Ex 19:7)
It should mean "Moses set before them all these words that the LORD had commanded him." And actually, it did, once I established that "kept" meant "gave" or "put".
The check was for a language called Sadri which already has the New Testament and Genesis. They have 9 translators working on the translation and there are about 12 million people who speak it as their first language. A bit bigger than the languages around here!
Above is what my screen looked like to do the check. I enjoyed working out how I needed to speak English to be understood, like saying "different-different tent(s)" to specify there were multiple tents. And I enjoyed learning that in Sadri the verb always comes at the end of a sentence, and 'prepositions' actually came after the thing they refer to. (So "which the LORD had commanded Moses" in Sadri was something like "which command the LORD Moses-to had given".)
Give thanks for the opportunity to be trained as a translation consultant to do the final check on other translations. Please pray for wisdom in knowing how much time to put into the training – on the one hand, any time put in takes away from my Plain English Version work, but the slower I do the training the longer it will take to become a qualified translation consultant.
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