In June we’ll be hosting a training session here to teach what we call MTT (mother tongue translators) how to use the paratext software to do translation and formatting. The terminology over the years has changed. It used to be that the ex-pat who had the linguistic training came and discipled people from a village as he learned their language. The ex-pat was called the ‘translator’ and the nationals the ‘helpers’. Now the ex-pat is called ‘translator assistant’ and the nationals are called ‘mother tongue translators’. As a result I never know exactly who is being spoken about when we say ‘translators’ because there are so many people over the years involved in the job. The personal confusion for me is a result of terms changing over the years to try and reflect the nature of the work, and yet some people use the older terms and some the newer. But under it all is a focus on the work of translating the Bible more than what we call the work. It’s people sitting in hot rooms, in tropical environments, together, pouring over God’s Word and how to translate it into the local languages. It’s computers working in hostile climates.
