I get a lot of email, really a lot of email! So much, that I’m often dreading the deluge that will greet me when I sit down each morning. And that may be the subject of another post, but today an email with a persistent subject caught my attention.
In my line of “work,” “proof reading” is very important. We’ve caught some potential faux pas just in the nick of time before they made their way to 40,000 plus magazine subscribers and as I wince, we’ve let a few typos get away from us as well.
The actual process of good proof reading is tedious and well, rather boring. But the concept of proof reading that this particular email was referring to had the highest stakes attached to it.
It was proof reading an almost complete and printed Bible, a Siawi Bible in fact.
And what stuck out was, that as I opened the list of corrections that the proof reader had compiled, the word processing program I used labeled almost every word as wrong. That was due to the words all being in Siawi, the language spoken by a people group in Papua New Guinea, who are months away from having God’s life giving Word in their own language! Thank God there are people who have given their lives to be able to proof read this language.
It’s important, very important, that we get these words right! The stakes are high and with still over 2200 languages waiting for God’s Word to come to them, we can’t afford “Typos” in this book!
Pray for missionary translators working around the clock around the world! And pray specifically for the Siawi translation as my team puts the finishing touches on this book!