Dagalou Josue Teme

Organization | Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)

My vision is to bring African linguistic communities together in a participatory way in order to document their langues, especially minorities ones, thus preserving their rich immaterial heritage. I have been translating the Bible in my mother tongue for about twenty years. At present, I have realized that while the Bible as a religious document requires sound exegetical investigation in order to aim for an accurate rendering in target languages, it is equally important, if not crucial to undertake a sound (socio) linguistic study (which includes phonological sketches, grammatical, morphosyntactic and discourse analysis and target-culture-friendly lexicons/dictionaries, in order to provide translated Bibles in target languages which bring the readership home. In other words, linguistic research is a non-negociable prerequisite if we want to democratize our rich african sociocultural and conceptual heritage.