On Tuesday the 11th of February, I (Aaron) set out on a trip to our beloved Mamusi village named Sivauna. I flew to a small regional airport in the town of Hoskins, where our dear and longtime friend Robyn joined the flight, then we flew together to the Mamusi area. She and her partner have finished four New Testaments in Papua New Guinea (PNG)! Robyn is also a seasoned and brilliant translation consultant, a colleague who visits various language communities to check and help improve their translations. This consultant check is a critical step in the Bible translation process, since an expert who does not speak the language can have a more objective mindset, and its completion represents nearly the final stage before a book is ready to be published.

So on Wednesday morning we sat down in the village house with three members of our Mamusi Translation team, along with the chairman of the Translation Steering committee and three other community members. It’s important to note that these three community members, who are Mamusi speakers, were not involved in translating the Gospel of John.

The basic process is as follows: we project the text on a screen in our conference room, and one of the translators reads a section aloud. Then Robyn asks a series of customized questions to the community members, some to check general comprehension and some to check on specific issues she sees in the translation that need to be addressed. The text that she has been studying and reading is the back translation (a very literal translation of the Mamusi text into English), since she doesn’t know Mamusi, but the rest of us are only seeing and hearing the Mamusi text. Robyn addresses her questions not to me or to the translators, but to the community members, who are mostly hearing and reading this text for the first time. In this way, she can help us check that what the translation says is actually communicating as intended.

Any time we come across a trouble spot in the translation, we discuss potential solutions together, then read the corrected version to our community members, and give Robyn a fresh back translation. If everyone agrees, we move on. At the end of the work day, I print out a copy of the day’s corrected chapters, then we gather some village friends on the translation house verandah and give it a final community read-through. Even at this late stage, they are helping us catch details that we’ve missed in earlier checks.  Once those chapters are approved by the community (including any little fixes), one of the translation team members brings it into our makeshift recording studio to read and record the text.

In this way, we make it through an average of two chapters a day, and we finish the book in about two weeks. Robyn officially certifies that our translation of John is up to standard, and we congratulate the team on a job very well done!

So that was a whirlwind of a village trip, during which I stayed incredibly busy. Since arriving back home last week, I’ve been preparing the finalized text for the print shop and editing the audio recordings for our media production team. We’re really praying that I’ll be able to bring back John materials in text, audio, and video form on my next trip in April. Please pray with us that all the details will work out and the printing and binding machines will work; we’re very blessed to have a large number of people all over the world helping us produce these materials.

That next trip in April-May will be my last time in the village for this calendar year. Evie will be graduating high school this June, and we’ll be heading back to the US for six months after that…more on that next time!

Thanks so much for your partnership with our family and with the Mamusi language community! We’re really excited to be able to put this portion of God’s Word in people’s hands very soon – thanks for being a huge part of that!