Manual of Discourse Workshops for Mother Tongue Translators: Volume 1 – Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan Languages
Carla Bartsch has been teaching discourse workshops for over twenty years for languages in North America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific, and has extensive experience in adapting this material to the educational level and linguistic background of workshop participants.
Many books have been written on narrative discourse structure and fewer on non-narrative discourse structure, but most of these are written at a high academic level. Understanding the discourse structure of text material in the receptor language improves the naturalness of translated material.
The Manual of Discourse Workshops for Mother Tongue Translators helps trainers who are planning to provide narrative and non-narrative discourse training workshops for people with little or no linguistic training. Participants learn how to discover the discourse features in texts in their receptor language and apply what they learn in translating the Bible, oral storying, or when checking any translated materials for naturalness.
Volume 1 uses examples from Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Forthcoming SIL e-Books to complete the three-volume series: Volume 2 (South Asian languages) and Volume 3 (Southeast Asian and Central Australian languages).