In most places you visit in Belize, English may not be spoken, but Creole usually is….
But can the word of God that's contained in the bible also be translated to kriol?
Well that's the whole purpose of Dr. Marlon Winedt's (Winet's) visit - he is a specialized Bible translator. He will be in Belize over the next couple days to work alongside the Belize translation team to provide technical support in translating Biblical text. Today Seven News caught up with the doctor himself at the University of Belize Faculty of Education and Arts Campus.
Dr. Marlon Winedt
"I am here in Belize. I work for the united bible society, that's an organization that promotes bible distribution and bible translation. In Latin America our whole region we have about 50-60 translation projects in different languages. I am here specifically for the Belizean creole project. Many people might be shock to hear that there is a Belizean creole project because some people don't see the creole language as a official language. But linguistically Belizean creole is a language just like English. It gets it words from English but when you compare in to other creoles "papiamientu" is my own creole language it's a afro-Portuguese and Spanish. You have creole in Surinam; you have French creoles and when linguist study all of the creole languages we notice that they have a lot of similarities. They often have an African base in our region, the African grammar and the words come from European language. So Belizean creole belong to the big family of creole languages. Now I am here specifically to work with the translation team. we have been working with the new testament and there are 2/3 finish already and 1/3 working on it now. So my visit is to help them; my expertise is in biblical languages Hebrew and Greek and also in translation studies so they do the translation, they are the mouth and tongue speakers and I just help them in looking at what the bible says if they are translating in accordance with the Greek translation theory. The translation they are doing is not a literal translation, its a translation with idiomatic, we are trying to communicate the meaning so that the young people can understand what the bible says."
While in Belize Winedt along with the Bible translation team will be meeting with church leaders from different denominations.
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