How to get God’s word into their hearts.
Another Pender missionary, D, has served as a Bible translator for 15 years. He develops software for language applications used by Bible translators. He tells us about an interesting challenge that translators encounter.
“One of the biggest challenges for modern machine translation systems is the problem of rare words. The Bible contains a lot of words that occur very infrequently, such as names of people and places. Machine translation systems learn how to translate by looking at examples, but do not get the chance to see rare words very much. As a result, they often do a poor job of translating these words. Ironically, these words are often some of the most important in a Biblical passage, and some of the easiest for a human to translate. In the Bible translation world, these words are referred to as key terms. Key terms are important words in a Bible passage that a translator should make sure that they get right. Translation teams will often develop a dictionary of key terms that is used throughout the process to ensure that these word are translated consistently correct.”
God often reveals himself to us through his written Word. But throughout Kenya, people don’t have access to Scripture. They found that they couldn’t relate to a God who didn’t speak their language. Now that these communities are receiving God’s Word in their language, everything is changing. Reverend Z said, “I am seeing God moving in a very marvelous and wonderful way in Bible translation in Kenya. People are reading God’s Word. I can see great transformation in some of those communities!
Please pray for D, his wife and 3 children. One of his children is in need of some special surgery which can be done here in the states. Because of covid they weren’t able to travel last summer, so are hopeful that next summer they will be able to come to the states and have the surgery that will make a huge difference in her life.
Author: Virginia Patch
