The Fosters

I know, it sounds sooo boring but it’s actually quite amazing. In September I returned to Mbeya where Ranette and I first started working when we came to Tanzania in 2004. I went to help lead a Discourse Analysis workship for 9 languages there. The idea was to figure out the grammar of stories. Before you change the channel, let me explain….

In school, we studied the grammar of sentences, for example you start with a subject, then a verb, then an object, etc. But did you know that all languages have rules for much larger pieces of text? A simple example in English would be that a typical story has an introduction, some tension development, a climax, and then a conclusion. If you change those elements around, it just wouldn’t seem right. Well believe it or not, there are many rules that govern us at this level of langauge. There are rules that say how you introduce major participants versus minor participants. There are rules that tell you when a key event has taken place. There are rules that say when you have to mention a person’s name again instead of using “him” or “her”. It goes on and on. And the rules are different for every language. For example in Bantu languages, you have to introduce an important person by saying that “a place had a person who was called…”. The Bible doesn’t do this so if you translate word-for-word it will sound really horrible. Or worse yet, you will make a very important person look unimportant.

Well, for three weeks, we looked at these rules in a collection of natural stories from each language and helped the translators understand how the rules work in their languages. After that, we taught them how to translate in a way that maintains accuracy but respects the rules of their langauges. This way, you get a translation that doesn’t sound like a translation!

It was a lot of fun and if you like languages (and I know there are sooo many out there ;), you realize that you are working in a playground here!