Team checking in Romans today. The epistles always are a challenge because of the long, run-on sentences. That’s something that Shekgalagari (and other Bantu languages) don’t handle well. In chapter 9, we ended up having to re-structure verses 11-12 just to get it to make sense. In the English NIV, it reads: “Yet, before the…

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Today we were working in 1 Corinthians during the review workshop in Kang and we ran into some problems with Paul’s tendency to use run-on sentences. We got to 1 Corinthians 4:7, which reads in the NIV, “For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And…

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When we were checking the Shiyeyi translation in Mark, we reached the story in chapter 2 where Jesus heals the paralyzed man who is brought to him by his friends. In the story, the men climb up on the roof and make an opening in the roof in order to lower the man down to…

Today in our checking session, we were working through the book of Titus. In this book, the qualifications for an elder in the church are laid out; one of them is that the elder must not be greedy for gain or dishonest for gain, depending on your English translation. In Shekgalagari, we translated this word…

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Shekgalagari is a small language in the eyes of the world, only about 65,000 speakers. But it is still diverse, with 5 distinct dialects spoken in Botswana. These are regional dialects, some of which are separated by big distances and some small. What is spoken in Hukuntsi is not always the same as what is…

Even though Shekgalagari and Setswana are distinct languages from each other, they are both related. And almost everyone who speaks Shekgalagari also speaks Setswana on a daily basis. So there is bound to be some overlap between the languages; they share some words and grammar characteristics, but they have many of their own words and…

At the start of our checking session today, we started by talking about the orthography (writing system) that we have chosen to use in Shekgalagari. It actually sparked an argument among the people present as to how we should be spelling certain words. There’s a lot of influence from other languages on Shekgalagari and so…