Three more Bible translation projects underway

EDWARD MPOLOKA
Correspondent | Friday August 23, 2013 00:00

With completion of the New Testament in one of the San languages and ikalanga recently, three more translation projects are in the offing. While the San project is headquartered in Ghanzi at D'kar, the Kalanga Translation Project, which is currently about to complete its translation of the Old Testament, is based in Francistown. The three new Bible translation projects, sponsored by different churches, will be working among the Yeyi in Maun, Bakgalagadi in Kgalagadi and the San in Shakawe. Translation of the New Testament into one of the San languages and ikalanga were recently completed.

To facilitate the translation effort for the new projects, a workshop was recently held in Gaborone where translators and coordinators from the old projects interacted with their counterparts on the new ones. Said the coordinator of the Kalanga Bible Translation Project (KBTP), Tafuluka Kubuya: 'We met at a workshop to know each other as we shall be working together. Most importantly, the interaction gave the just-started projects an opportunity to learn from the old projects about the challenges they are going to encounter as they go about their work.'

Kubuya revealed that computer literacy and translation principles were imparted on leaders of the new project and their staff by different resource persons at the workshop.'One of the challenges facing the new projects is that of literacy among the people in their own languages,' he explained. 'This has necessitated the start of literacy work in the concerned languages to enable the people to read the Bible in their own languages.'Literacy work to facilitate the reading of the Kalanga Bible has been led by Mukani Action Campaign (MAC), which is a group of Kalanga writers who have been writing and publishing books in iKalanga.