I did something today that I’ve never done before in any of the RWC
workshops I’ve facilitated! I sat with one of the Glossers and, because he was
struggling to read the Gusiilaay words that the word-collection group scribe
had written down, I read them to him so that he could come up with a French
equivalent, which he then added to the response sheets. At first it didn’t seem
to work all that well—no big surprise, I can imagine you thinking, since I don’t
know his language and so was probably butchering the pronunciation beyond
recognition. But actually, I don’t think I was doing too poorly with the
pronunciation, since this language is not a tone language and has only one
sound that does not exist in English, French or Puguli.
Maybe it was a question of him becoming accustomed to my pronunciation,
maybe it was that I actually did improve as the day went on, maybe we just
started off with a topic that was difficult for him (jewelry and all things
used to enhance a woman’s appearance) and moved to topics that he was more
familiar with (buildings, death), maybe it was just strange for him to work
with someone he didn’t know. But whatever the reason(s), in the first two
folders of topics that we worked on, he left many of the words untranslated,
claiming that someone else would have to provide a translation for those words.
After that, there were only a handful of words in each folder that he was
unable to translate, and we were able to get translations for those by going
back to the group that had collected the words and getting an explanation from
them as to what it was they had written down. I may well continue in this role tomorrow.
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