I could do this for decades
Workflow for Producing an Oral Introduction to Luke
We ended the meeting pumped for more. We had just spent four hours presenting our research, discussing our findings, and noting their implications for oral translation. Now, one of our team members could synthesize our work into a single oral draft.
Our parting words were,
"This was so much fun! We could do this all day long!"
I hope to facilitate this type of work, perhaps even with some of these team members, for decades to come. Let me tell you a little about what we did and how we did it.
The Project and Team
The Oral Exegetical Tools (OET) group is an inter-organizational coalition charged with creating exegetical tools in oral media for Bible translation teams. I recently joined this group and have been asked to produce an oral introduction of the background information needed to translate Luke. For this kind of oral introduction to a book, we are tasked with answering the following questions:
- What's the 30-second summary of what happens?
- Who is the author of this [choose one] story/prophesy/letter?
- Who was the biblical audience, the people who first heard this passage?
- What do we know about why the author wrote this [choose one] story/prophesy/letter?
- What is the time and place of writing?
- What was the political and religious situation at the time?
- What are some of the themes in this [choose one] story/prophesy/letter?
Providentially, at the end of the summer semester, several of the top students from Dallas International University's oral Bible translation course expressed interest in helping with oral Bible translation projects in the future. Knowing this, I sent out some emails. Four of them responded that they could help before school started. I had a team to help me with the project!
The Workflow
For our first meeting, I had combined my knowledge of the oral Bible translation process and personal knowledge management (PKM) to produce a preliminary workflow. Following the advice of one team member shared after that first meeting, we refined the workflow into its present form (see the picture above). Establishing a clear workflow meant everyone knew their part during each step and how it fit into the bigger picture. Clear expectations meant we could focus on doing our jobs well in the moment—the system allowed us to stay "in the zone" for longer. Since we were all comfortable and engaged, we had A LOT of fun along the way!
In our workflow, we oscillated between working by ourselves and as a group.
In the remainder of this letter, I briefly outline the workflow depicted in the image above.
Research
- Everyone claimed one or more of the questions listed above to research by themselves.
- We saved the first question, the thirty-second summary, for group composition.
Write
- Each person wrote up his or her research in a shared Google doc, which was organized into sections based on the seven questions already noted above.
- We aimed to write up our research in academic enough English (including proper citations) that the end product could be revised into a publication, and write in oral enough English that the general populace could understand our work.
- We wrote in a question and short-essay answer format: "Who did Luke write for? [Short essay answer]... Okay, if he wrote for Theophilus, did he expect others to read it? [Short essay answer]..."
Present
- At our meeting, we proceeded section by section. Whoever had written a section presented it to the rest of the team by either reading the section aloud or verbally synthesizing what they had written.
Discuss
- After each presentation, we asked questions and made comments. This resulted in synthesizing how that section interacted with other sections.
- We looked for ways to show translators how the information related to oral translation.
Initial Draft
- Someone recorded the highlights of the discussion.
- These highlights served as the initial draft for the section.
- In completely oral teams, this could take the form of an audio recording of the main points in a condensed form. It could even be a list of keywords or phrases.
- We, as primarily literate learners, did this in the form of bullet points.
Script
- A script for an oral product? By scripting, we mean condensing and organizing the information into a form acceptable to internalize as a final draft.
- We found it easiest for one person to turn the research and discussion into one cohesive product.
- The script must be in oral language. Thus, the "script" could easily be an audio recording.
- An option we considered: Why not "script" each section before presenting the information? Because it seemed far less effective.
- One individual could do this, but it would take a lot more time because they must understand each section thoroughly before synthesizing all the material.
- The connections we made during the presentation and discussion steps proved invaluable for scripting our draft.
- "Scripting" allowed us to keep the important points while cutting the audio down from around 25 minutes to 16 minutes total.
Internalization
- Whoever is doing the recording gets to know the script well enough that they can say their parts of the conversation in natural, oral English.
Incomplete steps: Final Draft, Check, and Publish
- We will record the final draft as a group; our draft will consist of the seven questions above with sub-questions for each topic.
- Once we get through the checking and publishing stage, I hope to update you on what else we learned!
My challenge for you
For what areas of your life could you establish a workflow to make things more efficient and fun?
Sources
- Mark Husband, one of the team members, first sketched our workflow. The one above is a digitalized version with slight modifications.
- All icons in the picture above come from flaticon.com