“For the Word of God is living and active, shaper than any two edged sword. Hebrews 4:12 (NAS). I, Jim, have been checking through the Dom draft of the Gospel of John with one of our dear Dom brothers in Christ, Philip. What a pleasure it has been to see him smile, to see his face light up when something that was read to him really connected. That is power of God’s Word in their mother tongue. In the Western world we take our mother tongue translation for granted (we have dozens and dozens of English translations). But in most of Papua New Guinea people have only their Tok Pisin Bible to read. Tok Pisin is the common or “trade” language of this country where over 800 local languages are spoken. It is a second language for most people here. As good as Tok Pisin may be it is not the Dom people’s mother tongue, not their heart language. But this is soon to change. We have all of the New Testament translated into the Dom language and now it is a matter of doing thorough comprehension checking to make sure it is accurate, natural and readable. It is a very time consuming task but so worth it when we see people like Philip just smile and say, “wow, that really says it.”
I still have the comprehension checking of John and Revelation to do with two or more people. Hebrews and Philemon are ready for the final check. Luke is ready for the final check but waiting for Matthew’s check and then will compare since there are a lot of similarities. I will be having the evaluation of the Dom translation of James and Matthew on the week of October 15th. I will be bringing Bapka and Kapia Joseph and Gena with me to help in the evaluating. I must say that these evaluations are very intense and a bit stressful for me. Please pray that all goes smoothly.