Mbeya-Iringa Cluster

Mbeya map Imagine about 3.5 million people without adequate access to the most important message for all mankind. That is the situation in southern Tanzania but now all that is changing!

In the middle of 2003, church communities in the region approached Wycliffe missionaries and said, "We need Bibles and we need them to be translated into the heart languages of our people!" A project was born in the fall of 2003 to serve ten language communities simultaneously by training mother-tongue translators and literacy workers.

Since then, only God can be attributed with the accomplishments that have happened to date because they have been no less than miraculous.

Take a look at what is happening in this exciting work:

Find out more about our language projects in the Mbeya-Iringa Cluster Project:

Bena
Bungu
Kinga
Malila
Ndali

Nyakyusa
Nyiha
Safwa
Sangu
Vwanji

For more information visit the following pages:

Learn more about Tanzania
Learn more about Bantu Language Clusters

Jun 22, 2007

Why create a dictionary?

Written by Zoe L.

Dictionary making doesn't sound very exciting, or even useful, but dictionaries are very useful in the work of developing a language. To speakers of a language it helps with spelling and literacy, and it brings status. To the outsider it provides insight into language learning and culture. For example, when a language like Malila has more than 18 different words for rodents—some considered delicacies—it certainly says something about the culture.

Mbeya-Iringa Teams Use Adapt It

Written by Valerie D.

Isn't there a computer program out there to help speed up the translation process? Maybe! The Mbeya-Iringa Cluster Project is trying out a program called Adapt It, which takes an existing translation of Scripture in a closely related language and a bilingual speaker, who knows the source text and receptor languages. Then using the Adapt It software the bilingual speaker translates a rough first draft of the text from the source language into his own language. The computer helps him out along the way by making suggestions of how to translate words and phrases that he had already translated before. In a pilot test, Adapt It was used to adapt a portion of the Chewa Bible (Malawi) into Nyakyusa, one of the Mbeya-Iringa Cluster languages. It was then used to adapt from Nyakyusa to Ndali, another of the cluster languages. From Nyakyusa it was also adapted into a Swahili back translation which was tested as front translation for Malila, yet another of the cluster languages. This back translation-front translation system could be used potentially for all Bantu languages in Tanzania and maybe even in other countries that use Swahili as a national/regional language.

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