[Olpc-Haiti] our Haiti translation site's now inEnglish+ French + on Facebook too!

[John Rigdon]

When I first returned from Haiti about 8 years ago I thought that I could 
create books in Kreyòl and sell them in the U.S. to subsidize getting them 
into Haiti.  That has proven not to be true.  Essentially all I have sold 
have been to mission groups - learn to speak Kreyòl and English / Kreyòl 
dictionaries and such.

A BIG challenge we face is getting material into Kreyòl that entices people 
to read - things they enjoy.  For children this is stories, and for adults 
this is self improvement (How to) material.  If adults need to know 
something to improve their life they will take the effort to learn to read 
it.

Wycliffe Bible Translators is now focusing on spoken translation and content 
because they know from a hundred plus years experience how very difficult 
the translation process is.  There is a strong argument for the case 
however, that until a people group develop a corpus of written literature 
their progress is slowed because the knowledge is lost from one generation 
to the next.

My experience has been that most Kreyòl speakers get the syntax right, but 
the spelling may not be correct.  Fortunately I have software that can check 
spelling and flag problematic words, and I have also over the years been 
introduced to several dozen Haitians in Haiti that relish the thought of 
finding my errors and helping to improve the initial translation.

The downside to this is that the process runs on "Haiti time" so our 
deadline of a few months to get a quality product probably means that we may 
need to pay some professional translators to review the final documents. 
There are relatively few of them that we can call on and of course they are 
very VERY busy now with the situation in Haiti.

John Rigdon