Steve Nicolle

With simplified language and terminology, this coursebook assists Bible translators with limited linguistics training to recognize differences in natural structures of the target and source languages for both narrative and behavioral genres. Concepts are carefully introduced with illustrative examples from both the Old and New Testaments followed by questions, exercises, and applications that effectively engage translation teams and individual translators to improve their draft translations and provide reasons for their decisions. These exercises and assignments promote careful scholarship by empowering translators to confidently present biblical truth in natural and accurate ways in the target language. As relevant, sections are addressed specifically to speakers of verb-initial, verb-medial, and verb-final languages. Further topics includeconnectors and constituent order in the source and target languages;the reporting of speech and the preferred positions for speech orienters;motivations for referring to participants and concepts in different ways;the most appropriate ways of exhorting different groups of people;rhetorical questions, conditional clauses, and relative clauses; andculturally appropriate ways of translating biblical poetry.Advanced concepts such as background versus foreground and the topic-focus distinction are presented in easy-to-follow, understandable terminology. In addition to translators, this coursebook will be of great interest to academics, training institutions, and field workers. Even experienced discourse instructors will learn new insights and new ways of teaching these concepts. Consultants and advisors assisting translation teams may want to use this coursebook in leading workshops or to integrate instruction in ongoing translation sessions. A variety of users will find it easy to read, deeply informative, and profoundly practical for translation.

This revised edition remains the only comprehensive grammar of the underdocumented Digo (Chidigo) language. Included in this revision is additional language material plus an expanded bibliography of publications in and about Digo.Besides a clear description of Digo morphology and syntax, with multiple illustrative examples, this grammar includes several glossed texts, a 1700-item wordlist, and a list of over 100 botanical names. It gives particular emphasis to semantic and discourse relations of elements that are often not analysed from this perspective in grammatical descriptions. These include the forms and functions of Digo's complex system of demonstratives, a description of over 30 tense, aspect, and movement markers, and a detailed discussion of information structure and non-verbal clauses. The original volume was a result of seven years fieldwork in Digo, the southernmost language of the Mijikenda cluster of Bantu languages, spoken along the coast of East Africa in Kenya and Tanzania.This book will be of interest to linguists concerned with Bantu languages, typology, morphosyntax, and semantics.