Silas and the other Burmese-speaking volunteers form a Resource Language Team and start drafting a set of texts from small books of the Bible. They want to learn the entire process first, so they start translating the tools for small books like 3 John. Once they’ve mastered the process, they will start working on the tools for larger books like Mark. These books follow the original Greek and Hebrew languages as closely as possible in English, and the team will translate them into Burmese.
Silas had learned basic Greek and Hebrew in seminary, but he cannot read them well, so he relies heavily on the English text. This literal English text has been aligned to Greek and Hebrew, so the team can verify that their Burmese translation tools remains faithful to the original as well. The Burmese literal text will be a great tool for Tavoyan and other language translators who do not know Greek or Hebrew, because it will give them insight into the form of the original languages of the Bible.
The next tool that the Resource Language Team develops is a Simplified Burmese text. The purpose of this tool is to clarify the meaning of the passage for concepts that would be unfamiliar or difficult for translators. The simplified text explains figures of speech and other tricky phrases using explanatory tools embedded in the text. The explanatory tools all need to be translated from English into the Burmese language as well. This is a lot of work, so they are not finished yet.
Creating the Burmese resources is only the first step in the creation process. Silas and the Resource Language Team must use a different software program specially designed to check their work. Working together, the team refines their Burmese language tools, so translators will have confidence that they are working from reliable texts when translating the Bible into their own language. One of the ways they do this is by aligning the Burmese text to the Greek and Hebrew texts.
After the team is confident that they have refined the resources to the best of their ability, they distribute them to other Burmese Christian leaders to evaluate. These leaders review the tools and provide valuable feedback for making them more useful to native-language translators.
The final step is to convert the translation software tools themselves from English into Burmese with the help of some IT people on John’s team. Silas is excited when he sees the finished software. Finally, all the tools that Bible translators need are in Burmese! After more than a year of work, the team has not yet translated a single book of the Bible into Tavoyan, but they have accomplished something much more important. They have created a set of tools for selected books of the Bible that any translator who knows Burmese can use to translate the Bible into their language. Not only that, they now have the ability to use the processes and tools they’ve created to repeat this for every other book in the Bible.
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