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Bible translators reach new milestone

A Bible translation team based on the 1500 miles off the east coast of Australia, has just completed the translation and audio recording of the New Testament and Psalms in the language of the Tuma-Irumu people.

Australian, Ross Webb, Director in Vanuatu for Wycliffe Bible Translators, sends this exciting update on the progress he and his team have made over the last few years. Be sure to
"tune your ears" to Mr. Webb's wonderful Australian
accent and expressions.

"Last Friday we finished at last 3 years of intermittent work on the audio version of the Tuma-Irumu New Testament and Psalms. We recorded the audio with readers of all sorts of reading abilities in the Irumu village of Zuepak on three different occasions and took the resulting files back to Vanuatu where we have our "day job" for what turned out to be, in many cases, lots and lots of editing to turn inexperienced readers into ones that sounded quite good.

The first set of recordings, about a quarter of the New Testament and thirty Psalms, we put on MegaVoice solar powered audio players to gauge the appeal for the Irumu people. They were a roaring success with continual requests for more.

On and off for the next two years we worked at producing the remainder of the New Testament and Psalms. The readers, young and middle aged, did a massive job. The pre-editors we enlisted to get out the very obvious repeats of uhmms, aaahs and clicks, did a massive job. My wife, Lyndal, and I who know the language and could thus smooth out the bumps and wrong intonation, well, bit off almost more than we could chew.

We fit it all around our day job and with a fair bit of huff and puff, and continually learning new time saving tricks on the audio editing software we packed the 11 GB of precious audio off via courier to MegaVoice for further processing by the audio team.

The future plan is to dedicate the revised Tuma-Irumu New Testament and Old Testament Portions in Papua New Guinea in October this year on the day of the original dedication 14 years ago. At the same time we will release to the glory of God another 400 MegaVoice players and at the same time recall the initial 200 players that only have a portion of the New Testament on board for reloading with the full version."

« Help Ross Webb and his Bible translation team reach more of the Irumu people.