Linguists' indigenous mission

[phil cash cash]

Published: 09.04.2006

Linguists' indigenous mission
By Shelley Shelton
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/145053

Just off the main drag in Catalina, in far northern Pima County, a group
of linguists has quietly worked for almost three decades at a craft that
combines their love and knowledge of language with a humanitarian and
spiritual journey.

Members of the Mexico branch of the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
headquartered at 16131 N. Vernon Drive in Catalina, devote their lives
to traveling the Mexican countryside, identifying indigenous languages
and working to formulate an alphabet and dictionary for those
languages.

Their ultimate goal is to provide each group of indigenous people with a
translation of the Bible or the New Testament in their native tongue.

The group's origins date to the 1920s, when Cameron Townsend discovered
selling Spanish-language Bibles in Guatemala was difficult because so
few people spoke Spanish, said Judy Oas, executive secretary to the
Mexico branch director.

Townsend began studying the native dialect of the Guate-malans so he
could translate the Bible. Mexican officials invited him to go to
Mexico when his work in Guatemala was finished, Oas said.

Townsend founded his first summer language course in Arkansas in the
mid-1930s, and in the early 1940s his growing organization formed
another group, called Wycliffe Bible Translators, to recruit more
members and raise money for living expenses and health insurance.

Since then, linguists have identified about 280 minority languages in
Mexico, with about 100 of them translated.

It takes an average of 20 to 25 years of work on each language from the
time the linguists immerse themselves in the local culture to when the
Bible translation is complete, said Albert Bickford, a linguistic
consultant who has worked with the group since 1978.

For much of the existence of the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
workers used visas they renewed each year to stay on-site in Mexico,
working with local people. The institute runs three facilities in
Mexico, the biggest of which is in Oaxaca, where linguists go to
process the information they gather.

The Catalina facility was built in the late 1970s, after the Mexican
government began limiting foreigners' long-term visas.

The Wycliffe members looked for places near the Mexican border to build
a sort of home-away-from-village where they could continue working when
their visas expired in Mexico, but they settled on Catalina — about 90
miles north of the border — because the rural surroundings were similar
to the setting in many of the villages where they worked.

If members brought villagers from Mexico to help them, those villagers
were more likely to feel at home, said Carol Zylstra, a translator who
also has been with the group since 1978.

Required training varies depending on what a volunteer plans to do for
the organization, but translators need to have a bachelor's degree in
any subject and two additional semesters or summer sessions in
linguistics and anthropology, Bickford said.

The main emphasis is to let volunteers into the field to get real-life
experience before they come back and work on master's degrees, he said.

Though Wycliffe recruits members and provides some financial support in
the form of keeping the linguistics centers open, individual volunteers
must solicit their own financial support, which often comes from their
local churches.

In 1990, the Mexican government began to ease its visa restrictions, and
most of the linguists again began to spend most of their time in Mexico.
Now the Catalina center serves mainly as a research hub for the workers,
as well as the headquarters for sending the Bibles out to be printed.


On the Net
| For more information on the work of the Mexico branch of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics, visit www.sil.org/mexico
| To find out how you can assist with the institute's linguistics work,
call 825-6000.