The Long Long and Winding Road

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HOME STRETCH…ed
We’re about to begin the final week of recording the audio version of the Palawano New Testament and we really need your prayers.

Yes, it’s the Home Stretch, and we are being stretched, as well!

The whole NT has been recorded from Matthew to Revelation and the initial checking and corrections (rerecording short passages) has been completed. Praise the Lord for this! We’re thankful for this milestone, good progress, and the great team God has sent to help with this project.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME?
Now we are doing the final edit which involves listening to the entire NT once again, checking for any errors that may have slipped through, deleting unnatural pauses, etc.

The challenge we face is that it takes about 2 hours to do the final edit on each hour of recorded material, and there don’t seem to be enough hours in the week to get it done.

The Palawano New Testament is significantly longer than the normal 18-hour New Testaments Luke and Kristen have been recording in Africa. In hindsight, we see that we should have budgeted a few extra weeks to get the Palawano project done, but we didn’t realize this until it was too late.

So we have about 50 hours of listening and checking to get done… all in the next 5 days, plus rerecording any errors we might find.

WHY IS OUR TRANSLATION LONG?
It’s mostly a language issue. For example, to track dialogue, Palawano adds “he said” to each sentence of recorded speech (that’s about 4,000 times in the New Testament!)

Also, narrative discourse adds what is called head-tail links like this:

So Jesus went to Galilee.
When he got to Galilee, he entered the synagogue.
When he had entered there, he began to teach….

Those connections seem repetitious and unnecessary to us, but they are how Palawano tracks people and events throughout a story. Without them, the reader or listener would be lost. And you can imagine how those extra sentences would add up, time-wise, as Susing reads all the gospels and Acts!

SO PLEASE KEEP PRAYING
So as we enter this final week, we ask you to pray with us that the project can be completed–done, and done well!

Please pray:

  • for stamina as we listen through long hours of checking
  • for any remaining mistakes to be found
  • that we can finish within the time remaining before we all fly back to the USA on March 24.

Thank you for your part in this ministry!

Reaching Palawanos together with you,

-Bill and Donna

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