Author: David M. Hare

When I ask the question, “Do you believe in magic?”, if you are like me, what comes to mind is either Disney or that one song by the Lovin’ Spoonful. But magic (or witchcraft/sorcery/juju) has a much different meaning to many people here in Cameroon. Here are some recent examples I have heard of: People will go to shamans (French: marabout, Kwakum: kaah, Anglophone Cameroon: ngambe man) for protection, or to have curses put on their enemies. So, at many funerals a special ritual is performed to determine who put a curse on the person that died. Also at funerals,…

The other day, as I was looking for a John Piper quote, I came across the NY Times article A Pastor’s Son Becomes a Critic of Religion on TikTok. The article speaks of the rising popularity of Abraham Piper, son of John Piper. Abraham was originally excommunicated from Bethlehem Baptist, but then returned to the church four years later. Throughout the years I have seen some of his social media posts, and I have often found his attitude to be cynical and (honestly) concerning. So, now Abraham is rising in fame as an “Exvangelical.” His platform: criticizing evangelicals and the…

What an amazing Easter! Stacey and I had the privilege of seeing our co-worker and friend Jean Pierre (JP) baptized on Sunday. Baptism is always exciting in our village because the river is a long walk from our church building. That means that the whole congregation (and even a bunch of people not a part of the congregation) end up singing praises to God all along the way. Baptism to me has always felt solemn, sacred, quiet. But baptism here is a party, a time for rejoicing, and very much like the arrival of a newborn. One of the most…

I have seen an increase in missionaries coming to the field for a fixed term. That is to say, they come to the field with a particular term length in mind. Some will come for two, four, five, or ten years. Then, they return to their home country. From my experience, this seems to be the norm now. And when we talk to Americans, they usually ask us how long we are planning on staying. I will respond with, “our plan is to die in Cameroon (hopefully later rather than sooner).” Since this is a less common reply, I thought…

This is the last of seven videos that we made describing the Bible translation process. In this video Stacey interviews Jean Pierre, who is our back translator. He takes our Kwakum translation and translates it back into French so that our consultants can interact with it and ask questions and make recommendations. Here are all of the videos: Kwakum Translation: Step 1: Exegesis Kwakum Translation: Step 2a: Drafting Kwakum Translation: Step 2b: Drafting Kwakum Translation: Step 3a: Testing Kwakum Translation: Step 3b: Testing Kwakum Translation: Step 3c: Testing

Stacey presents the final video on testing here. She discusses how we go out into the villages and test our translations to make sure that they are understood.

This is the fifth video in our series on the process of Bible translation. In this video Stacey talks with Raphaël, Albert, and Jules who are 3 of the members of our testing team. In this video they discuss some of the tests they perform in making sure that our translation is faithful, clear, and understandable.

So far, we have described the first two steps of Bible translation in three videos: Exegesis, Drafting A, and Drafting B. This video is the first of several in which Stacey describes the third step: Testing. This video features Mama Brigitte, one of the eight Kwakum translators on our team.

In this video Patrice (one of our translators) describes more about the Drafting step of the process.

I saw on Twitter that someone used Google Translate to translate the words to Smash Mouth’s song “All Star” into Aramaic and then back into English. These were the results: It is funny to read because you can kind of get a taste for what the original said, but it sounds so bad. It’s English, but it’s not. Well, there is a reason that we don’t use Google Translate for Bible translation. For one thing, there is no Kwakum option on Google. But mainly because computers can’t do translation. You need people for that. The Difficulty of Translation At some…