LANGUAGES AND TRANSLATION...................................

Languages have been a part of my life since I was two years old.  My mother said that I talked English early. And at the age of two I went with my parents to Paris for a year and learned French there.  When we got to West Africa, our family was assigned to Baramba in Mali among the Mianka people, and there I picked up Mianka as that is what my little friends spoke in the village.  (That is one language I have not retained, the only thing I can remember are a few numbers!)  When my parents took me back to West Africa after the Second World War, we went to an area where Jula was spoken and so I learned Jula.  When Dad and I, as new missionaries, were assigned to the Santidougou district of Upper Volta (the name in those days), we were told to learn the Bobo Madare language, an oral language, which we had to write down.  Some language work had been done in Bobo many years before but it was in a trunk in the ship that the Bell family took to get to the States - and all the language materials went to the bottom of the sea when that ship was torpedoed in the war! 

Dad's language history is much difference from mine.  He spoke only English - New England accented English until the age of thirty, and then we landed in Paris. He started to learn French and that was a steep learning curve for him. He thought that "Parlez-vous français?" Had something to do with "Polly wants a cracker".  But he persevered and learned and of course preached in French for most of his life, as well as in Bobo

In learning and writing down Bobo Madare, I planned out each day's language ahead of time in Jula (the vocabulary, new sentence structures, etc,) and then sat down with Pastor Pierre my language helper to elicit the identical expression in Bobo.  Pierre, bless his heart, was not the best language helper in the world. He used to fall asleep sometimes as we were working together. Everything I learned in my morning lesson with him, I then practiced on the women in our village. I also made up a new lesson each day for Dad to learn with a language helper. Yusufu, who worked in our house, was an excellent language helper, so between the two men and village conversations, we were able to start speaking the language. 

In the meantime, you kids picked up Bobo as you played with your village friends and were soon rattling away. I guess John was the only one who was mono-lingual - and that was in Bobo, not English! 

When we went to Africa, it never occured to me that I would some day be working in an unwritten language and even doing translation and original writing in that language. But the Lord had prepared me in my choice of college subjects, as I had a minor in cultural Greek and took a course in Phonetics.

We soon realized - after our arrival in Santidougou - that our people expected us to give them a written form of their language and to translate the Bible for them.  Those who could read used the Jula Bible but had to orally translate the text into Bobo so everyone would understand. Most women and the children did not speak anything but Bobo. So our original goal was to translate the New Testament and provide some other Christian literature and make up reading primers to teach the Bobos how to read their own language. 

We tried to translate New Testament books according to needs in the church. For example, Luke was the first Gospel we translated and we chose that because it has the events of the birth of Christ plus His life and death.  We actually translated Luke chapter 1 and 2 one year and had it ready for Christmas that year. Then later added the remainder of the book.  Acts came next as that was the history of the church so gave a good history of the start of the church and the spread of Christianity.  We were having a training session for the few pastors and church leaders we had among the Bobos, and so we translated the books of first and second Timothy which gives the qualifications for church leaders.  Problems of various sorts developed in some of our churches and 1 Corinthians spoke to the Scriptural solutions for these.  And thus we translated book bu book and finally ended up with a New Testament, checked and printed by the Bible Society.  During that period of time there were numerous seminars held for those translating the Bible into various Burkina and Mali languages and we learned much by attending these seminars, along with our language helpers.

Along with the Scriptures, we produced literacy primers.  We also did two full years of Sunday School lessons for teaching the church children and trained teachers to teach the weekly classes.  We produced numerous small booklets on subjects of interest to the Bobos.  We did a monthly paper in the Bobo language on ditrict news - this was call Puru Sebe and the people enjoyed reading that.

In 1989, it was proposed to us that we do a complete Bible translation - what a bombshell!  The Bible Society wanted to produce more full Bibles for the peoples of West Africa, and our language was one chosen to be translated.  This meant choosing a team, training them, working with them daily, raising money for such a huge project - translation projects are costly!   And so we finally decided to go for it - and that is all another chapter of our history!