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Update 'translate/translate-alphabet/01.md' 

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Susan Quigley 2019-08-21 15:18:14 +00:00
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If your language has not been written before, you might consider doing an audio translation of the Bible. However, if writing your language is a desire of the people, then you will need to create an alphabet and then you can use it to create a written form of the translation. This is a decision the community will need to be involved in as much as possible. Creating an alphabet requires listening to the sounds in your language and figuring out the best way to represent those sounds on paper.
The goal of a good alphabet is to have one letter represent each different sound of your language. Here are some steps you can take to create your alphabet. It is best to work through these steps with a team rather than on your own. You will also want to ask people of the community to try reading something in the new alphabet once you've developed it. This will help affirm that your alphabet is workable, and will show you areas of weakness that may need to be changed.
It is important to make your alphabet easy to learn and read. One way to do this is to have one letter (or sequence of letters) represent each sound of your language. Here are some steps you can take to create your alphabet. It is best to work through these steps with a team rather than on your own. You will also want to ask people of the community to try reading something in the new alphabet once you've developed it. This will help affirm that your alphabet is workable, and will show you areas of weakness that may need to be changed.
If a neighboring language already has an alphabet, and if that language has similar sounds to your language, it might work well to simply borrow their alphabet. If not, then it may work to borrow the alphabet from the national language that you learned in school. However, it is likely that your language has sounds that the national language does not, and so it will be difficult to use this alphabet to represent all of the sounds of your language. In that case, it is good to think about each sound in your language. Write out the national language alphabet on a piece of paper from top to bottom. Then write a word from your language next to each letter that either starts with that sound or has that sound in it. Underline the letter that makes that sound in each of the words. You can add punctuation notations to create sound markers that are not part of the alphabet. For example a sudden stop (glottal stop) or intake of breath can be noted with apostrophes or other marks.
If a neighboring language already has an alphabet, and if that language has similar sounds to your language, it might work well to simply use their alphabet. If not, then it may work to use the alphabet from the national language that you learned in school. However, it is likely that your language has sounds that the national language does not, and so it will be difficult to use this alphabet to represent all of the sounds of your language. In that case, it is good to think about each sound in your language. Write out the national language alphabet on a piece of paper from top to bottom. Then write a word from your language next to each letter that either starts with that sound or has that sound in it. Underline the letter that makes that sound in each of the words. You can add punctuation notations to create sound markers that are not part of the alphabet. For example a sudden stop (glottal stop) or intake of breath can be noted with apostrophes or other marks.
There may be letters in the national alphabet that your language does not use. That is fine. Now think about the sounds from these words that you had a hard time writing, or that you could not find a letter for. If the sound is similar to a sound that you did find a letter for, then maybe you can modify that letter to represent the other sound. For example, if you have a sound represented by "s", and a similar sound that there was no letter for, you could add a mark to the letter for the similar sound, such as putting ' or ^ or ~ on top of it. If you find that there is a group of sounds that seem to all have the same kind of difference from the national language sounds, then it is good to modify that group of letters in the same way.