Travels in Papua New Guinea
- Admin
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
Last month, Larry traveled some 600 miles from the Doyles’ home in Ukarumpa to Buka Island in Papua New Guinea for two weeks. In Buka he visited the Solos people, whose Bible translation project he helped start and still oversees. There are approximately 15,000 Solos speakers who have never had the Bible translated into their heart language.
The Doyles’ most recent newsletter was filled with reports and pictures from this trip.
Larry visited Kahule village, the site of the upcoming final segment of Translators’ Training Course 1. He spoke with the village leadership and with the translators. They were able to settle on June 23-July 4 for this course, and make plans for it. This will prepare 11 new members to join the Solos Bible translation team!
Part of the translation process is language discovery. For three days, Larry trekked from village to village, collecting wordlists for a dialect survey at six of them, and distributing literacy books for school children at a total of 12. It is exciting to see these literacy books finally getting into the hands of teachers. Larry delivered plastic containers, each one having 30 copies of seven different books. One of these was an alphabet book.
The second week of the trip Larry spent with the Solos translation team to finalize Joshua 1-15. They also worked to type three more chapters of back translation with the new team members. And there was still more language work to be done—translating more Solos stories into English for checking, and collecting pages of new words for a dictionary. Literacy books were also distributed to the remaining seven villages.
Bible translation has many steps of training, checking, and refining so that the finished product presents the Word of God accurately and intelligibly for the Solos readers. The goal of the children’s literacy books is to help more Solos people become literate and able to read their new Scriptures. It is a blessing to learn how God helped Larry on this trip to accomplish additional steps for both of these goals.
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