Hazel Gray
BIBLE TRANSLATION IN TANZANIA
Hazel Gray was a member of our church family up to the time she went away to university in Bath in 2003 to study Mathematics. She finished her course in 2007 and subsequently joined Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) - mathematicians seem to make good language analysts! She then spent 2 years working in Musoma, in northern Tanzania, returning to the UK at the end of 2009. After completing a one-year African Linguistics Masters at Leiden University in 2012 she then returned to Tanzania in March 2013 where she has been serving as part of the Mbeya team ever since (click here for an interactive map of the language groups of Tanzania).
WBT have a vision to provide everyone in the world with access to God’s Word in a language they truly understand. At present there are some 7,000 languages in the world today, only 554 of which have the whole Bible (see current Bible translation statistics on the Wycliffe UK website here).
The Mbeya Cluster Project (MCP) is partnering with mother-tongue speakers of 13 local languages to translate the Scriptures into these languages. Hazel is working on Kisi and Manda, two languages spoken on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi, languages which were added to the original ten languages of the MCP along with Pangwa in 2012. Her aim is to provide these people groups with the best possible writing system for their language and provide linguistic support for the translation team as they encounter challenges using the writing system. Hopefully, translation will start on Kisi and Manda in 2016 or early 2017. As part of the MCP linguistics team she is also assisting with linguistic checks of translated portions of Scripture in Nyakyusa and Bungu, two of the original ten MCP languages (MCP was started in 2003), to make sure that books are printed with as few spelling errors as possible!
As a member of the church family involved in world mission the PCC has decided that we should support Hazel in prayer and financially. If you would like to receive Hazel’s prayer letter directly, please email her at hazel_gray@sil.org to be put on her mailing list.