Janet McLarren is an anthropology consultant with SIL Eurasia. She worked with a diaspora translation project for five years, and wrote her master's thesis on diaspora women in southern France. She works with the SIL Global Diaspora Team as a consultant.
Transnational Translators
Abstract
Michel Kenmogne, Director of SIL International, challenged us during the SIL International Conference ‎‎2021 to examine our mental models of Bible translation and language development. Mental models ‎are representations of reality consisting of generalizations and expected outcomes. It takes mental ‎energy to change mental models, so they don’t always reflect our current reality. We often base our ‎mental models of people in diaspora on behavior patterns of diaspora groups of previous centuries ‎which no longer hold true in today’s globalized, mobile world. In this paper I present a new mental ‎model for translation and language development projects which includes people in diaspora as active ‎participants. Many people in diaspora today are transnationals, they live in more than one national ‎space. They travel, engage frequently with people in the homeland through technology, and build ‎networks with diaspora in other locations of the world. Their loyalty to the homeland communities ‎and to their worldwide networks places them in unique positions to forward Bible translation. ‎Transnational translators support translation and language development in part through finances, ‎through promoting Scripture and literacy in their communities of origin and in the diaspora ‎communities, and through spreading the vision of the worldwide translation movement.‎
Materials from this presentation are not available for public distribution.
About the Author
Eurasia Area SIL