Can Punctuation Make You Emotional?
It can be far too easy sometimes to lose perspective and forget about the big picture when you’re doing linguistic research for Bible translation. In the last week of February, we were winding down a Discourse Analysis Workshop for the Mara Cluster Project and we were trying to relate a lot of technical linguistic concepts to translation work. On one particular hot afternoon, we were trudging through a lecture on punctuation.
Our consultant was teaching and I was struggling to pay attention as his voice was often drowned out by the corrugated iron roof buckling under a relentless equatorial sun. It was not a moment that you would remotely think could lend itself to somebody being impacted in a life changing way! But then, out of the blue, as I was just about to angle my laptop toward the wall and launch facebook, one of the Ngoreme translators stood up and said, “My friends, are you hearing what the teaching is saying? This is very important for all of us. None of us care about punctuation because it’s so tedious but this is amazing!” I closed my laptop and looked across the room and there he was, his eyes on fire as he tried to rally his 18 colleagues back into a state of attention.
He eloquently carried on, ”I always thought that punctuation was a fixed set of rules imposed on us from other languages but today I’m learning this is not the case. The teacher is saying that we must listen to our recorded stories and put the commas and periods where all the pauses are. That means, punctuation rules follow our languages! And it means that if we get it right, when people read our translations out loud to others, they will pronounce it the right way and people will listen.”
I’d never seen someone so impacted by a lecture on punctuation! I grabbed my camera and caught this photo of him just as he was finishing speaking. He was so convincing that all of the other students in the room applauded when he was finished. In the staff debrief later that evening, we talked about it. Both the consultant and I got emotional thinking about how impacted this translator had been about the lecture. Who would have ever thought commas and periods and paragraph breaks would have touched us so much?!
