Forei Tribesmen, Australian New Guinea. Wycliffe Translators Ray and Ruth Nicholson work among them.
dred dedicated students from a num ber of denominational groups and mission boards are being trained to analyze strange speech sounds, get them down on paper slips, and make a written language out of them. And Wycliffe Bible Translators, the affiliate corporation, organized in 1942 when academic and missionary activities grew beyond the proportions of efficient handling by one organiza tion, holds the ropes for some 875 translators and support personnel — pilots, mechanics, radiomen, nurses, teachers, etc.—working in more than 200 tribes in 11 countries of the world. One is impressed as he reads this book with a new realization of the power — miracle-working power — of a mighty God, and the power in herent in words — words in a man’s native tongue— exerting a force and conveying a depth of meaning in that heart language that they never could in a “ foreign” or even an ac- quired tongue. It may well have been the blunt words of an old-maid missionary which arrested William Cameron Townsend in the middle of his col lege career and sent him off to the mission field of Guatemala instead of the World War I battlefields of France. “ You big cowards!” she had said, “ Going away to war and leaving the mission field to us women!” And the wistful question of a sim ple Guatemalan Indian — “Why hasn’t God learned our language?” was influential in turning Townsend from a colporteur of Spanish-language Bibles and tracts into a translator of the Word of God for the Cakchiquel Indians, whose complex language has SEPTEMBER, 1940
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Translators Martha Duff and Mary Ruth Wise working with Amuesha Indian, Peru. as many as 100,000 forms for one verb. During the 12 years of intense linguistic labor before the New Testa ment was placed in the outstretched hands of believers, Townsend learned many invaluable lessons in transla tion methods which were to prove foundation stones for budding trans lators in years to come.
aries could be taught to reduce a language to writing and to translate the Scriptures. . . . The result was a decision to go to Mexico and ask per mission to send in Bible translators. . . . We also agreed to start a training camp for pioneer linguistic mission aries to be conducted each summer.” “ But we aren’t working in Ecua dor,” her Wycliffe friends told Rachel Saint at the Peru Base in 1952. Rachel had expressed an interest in working with the Aucas. When at the meal that day Cameron Townsend made the announcement that Wycliffe had been invited to work in Ecuador, Rachel says, “ I knew then that the Lord was opening the way for me to work in the tribe that was ‘over the border.’ God led, step by miraculous step, until Rachel Saint and the Auca girl, Dayuma, who had received Christ through Rachel’s patient teach ing of the translated Word, were liv- (continued on noxt page) 45
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It was while Townsend was re cuperating in California from tuber culosis that God gave the shaft of light which later became the Sum mer Institutes. L. L. Legters, mission ary and minister, himself fired with zeal for the tribes by a trip to the Cakchiquel field, visited the patient and urged him to pioneer in another tribe. Of his answer, Townsend wrote: “ . . . I pointed out to him that some thing needed to be done which would speed up the giving of the Word to all . . . tribes who had never had it. . . . I suggested that we found a sum mer institute where pioneer mission
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