There are about 14,000 Bekwel speakers in Congo (Brazzaville), along the border with Cameroon. The following prayer update caught my eye as we work with this project and one of the students in the i-DELTA training program this cycle is a Bekwel speaker. He is working towards being a specialist in helping his community and others better engage with their newly translated Scriptures. He is the one who gathers and distributes recordings of the book of Luke as well as is learning to maintain and develops apps and a website in i-DELTA. His role will become crucial as the team completes the translation!

Bekwel Project in the Republic of the Congo

The New Testament in the Bekwel language is nearly complete! The translation team is in the final stages of this exciting project after already distributing translated Scripture portions through SD cards, print, apps and websites. Plus, they have trained literacy and listening group leaders to improve Scripture access for the Bakwele community. We join the team in praising God that after gathering regularly to listen to the audio recordings of the Gospel of Luke in their language, seven people decided to follow Jesus! Each was baptized and became a member of a local church. God is changing people’s hearts through listening groups that have formed throughout the region!  Bible translation work is also stirring positive change among Bakwele Christians. A project coordinator shared, “We can see it bringing people together, building bridges of fraternal love.” Please pray for: Good health for all team members as they carry out the final stages of this project. Clear communication and reliable internet connection as the team works remotely across four regions, with translators in Ouesso and Dolisie (Republic of the Congo) and technical support in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and Europe. Stable internet connection as consultants Ruth and Pau assist the team in refining the New Testament texts for accuracy and clarity.​​​​

This was written for and by Wycliffe USA staff newsletter (Touchpoints Worldwide April 2025)

Here’s an interesting BBC article about a ship that keeps undersea cables connected. In some countries, this is their only connection to the internet so when the cable has a problem, an entire country goes offline.

“Because of me, countries stay connected,” Shuru Arendse, a cable jointer from South Africa who has been working on the ship for more than a decade, tells the BBC.

The article mentions the May 2024 undersea cable problem which creates network problems in Cameroon for a while.

Read more at this link.

Here’s a few images to help you see some of the things that went on during i-DELTA is 2024. Summarizing an eight-week program in a few photos is hard, but here are a few.

Here, Shannon is teaching in large and small groups.

The students and instructors met often in small groups for discussion and to pray with each other.

And of course there were times where the group came together to play volleyball. The teacher vs. student game is highlight and comes with a trophy. And of course, multiple times per day everyone joins together for a meal.

Here are all the students and instructors for a group photo.

We are looking forward to i-DELTA in 2025.

We are glad to share this year’s Wycliffe Bible Translators Impact Report hightlighting some of what God has done in 2024 through Bible translation!

Vision 2025 is the goal to have a translation program in progress for every language that needs one by the end of 2025. It was adopted as a goal back in 1999 and we are much closer to that date today. What is the progress towards that goal?

There are many countries that have met that goal and others where only 1 language remains. Cameroon, the country our work is connected to, is one of four countries that Wycliffe has highlighted with the highest remaining needs. The purple countries also have significant needs. Please pray for the work going on in these countries.

Wycliffe will be having a Scripture Celebration to rejoice with communities around the world who now have access to Scripture in their language!

You can attend from the Wycliffe USA Facebook page on September 30th to hear incredible stories of how God is at work — everything from personal testimonies to current statistics in Bible translation. Celebrate with fellow believers as we collectively work toward the day when all people have access to Scripture.

As the article says: “Many of us, as it turns out.”

In our work in Cameroon which is not only Bible translation, but language development, literacy, and community development the passing of languages from parents to their children is an important aspect of whether a language is living and vibrant or on the decline.

Many languages of Cameroon are facing challenges from more dominant languages. Language not only like English and French, but other language of wider communication.

From the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230608-what-happens-when-you-cant-speak-your-parents-native-language

Everyone experiences transitions, but it seems like missionaries and their families experience a few more than normal. Our kids have heard about transitions more than they can count: by us, their parents, counselors, youth leaders, and teachers. They are definitely aware of them, but whether they are better at navigating them than the rest of us is still an outstanding question.

But these last few years seems to have been full of various transitions, an anomaly among our past years which were already full of transitions. Even if we have now been in the same location for a while, maybe you can relate.

And honestly, changes are hard.

I recently came across this quote in a presentation about transitions (because we’ve heard about transitions more times than we can count, but we still try to get better at them):

To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day
may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should be rather an expression
of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God.
Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with
surprises all the time.

Oswald Chambers https://utmost.org/classic/the-graciousness-of-uncertainty-classic/

And that’s really it. In all this uncertainty, be certain of one thing: Be certain of God.

I don’t want to say that I’m particularly good at transitions, but one thing I’ve felt really helped get me and my family through all these recent transitions is this one fact. We are certain of God. He has been faithful, he is faithful, he will be faithful. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Translation projects always have difficulties, but in some areas of Cameroon they are facing exceptional hardships. This blog post from a partner organization, JAARS, highlights what has been going on in a cluster project in Cameroon.

And yet, the translators didn’t give up. “What we started, we must finish,” they said. The translators would hike—sometimes for eight hours—to the village where they worked. They would stay there and translate for two days, then hike back home until the next week, when they would do it all over again.

Sometimes people will mention to us after we share with them about our ministry about “how much we’ve sacrificed”. It’s true, there have been sacrifices. But, when you see the efforts of many of our Cameroonian colleagues who face difficulties well beyond what we have, it makes you think that we have not sacrificed much at all.

What We Started, We Must Finish

Given our roles in supporting Bible Translation in the domains of linguistics and technology, it begs the question about the role of AI and machine learning in Bible translation. This is something that we have been working on more actively recently and will be more and more as we move forward.

There are currently just a few options for low-resource languages to use for Bible translation. In this context, low- resource languages are those without large amounts of recordings or books written and published and available for computers to use in their learning and analysis. The language communities that we are working with are definitely low on resources from a language technology perspective as there may be no written or published materials in the language at all for use in computer modeling. But as linguistics field work and literacy work is done with a language group, there are ways to help move Bible translation forward using computers to help.

ScriptureForge – drafting of Scripture that is based on previously translated Bible text, currently useful for producing back-translations, which are a necessary step in translation checking for accuracy, clarity, and naturalness. In the near future, the hope is that it could also provide translation suggestions into the target language and learn as it goes.
TBTA – grammatically tagged draft from original Hebrew and Greek. This needs a lot of work to make it natural and clear and takes a lot of preparatory work to label the linguistics tags of the target language, sort of like making a grammar and dictionary for the computer to follow.
FLExTrans – interlinearisation of text, using a closely related language as source and based on good linguistic rules of the differences between the languages to make a good draft.

None of these options are perfect and none of them work as well as something like a chat bot but for undocumented languages or those with little previous development, these are options that are worth exploring and trying out, so that is what we are doing.

Next week, there will be an initial training in Cameroon to explore more how AI can be used to draft an Old Testament in a waiting language using an already translated New Testament using Scripture Forge. Please pray with us for good understanding of the possibilities and limitations inherent in using AI and also for a clear way to bring God’s Word to communities sooner.