Title: “The Sojourner’s Tale”

1. Prologue: A brief narrative introducing the main character, a sojourner named Elias, and his quest for wisdom and understanding.

2. Chapter 1: Elias’ journey begins. He encounters a wise old man who shares three proverbs about life, faith, and perseverance.

3. Chapter 2: Elias arrives in a city where he witnesses a heated argument between two religious leaders. He listens to their debate and reflects on the nature of truth and belief.

4. Chapter 3: Elias attends a worship service where a liturgical ceremony is performed. The chapter includes a description of the ritual and its significance.

5. Chapter 4: Elias discovers a letter from his father, which contains a genealogical record of his family and a personal message of love and guidance.

6. Chapter 5: Elias meets a group of travelers who share a meal with him. During the meal, one of the travelers tells a parable about the importance of compassion and forgiveness.

7. Chapter 6: Elias has an apocalyptic dream filled with symbolic imagery and prophecies about the future. He struggles to understand its meaning and seeks the advice of a local interpreter.

8. Chapter 7: Elias encounters a prophet who delivers a message of repentance and hope. The prophet’s words are a mix of poetry and prose, and they deeply impact Elias.

9. Chapter 8: Elias joins a group of worshippers in singing a hymn of praise. The lyrics of the song are included in the chapter.

10. Chapter 9: Elias meets a teacher who shares a sermon on the nature of wisdom and the importance of living a righteous life. The sermon includes a short creed or statement of belief.

11. Chapter 10: Elias faces a moral dilemma and seeks guidance from a trusted mentor. The mentor shares a piece of wisdom literature, similar in style to the book of Ecclesiastes, to help Elias navigate his decision.

12. Epilogue: Elias reflects on his journey and the lessons he has learned. He pens a letter to his future descendants, sharing his experiences and encouraging them to seek wisdom and live according to the truths he has discovered.

This outline incorporates various genres found in the Bible, including narrative, proverbs, argument, liturgy, genealogy, parable, apocalyptic literature, prophecy, poetry, hymn, sermon, wisdom literature, and epistolary. While condensed, this structure provides a way to showcase the diverse literary forms found in the Bible within a single, cohesive story.

Linguistic levels

While this outline addresses genre coverage, there are also other linguistic levels that we need to consider. These include (among others):

• Lexical coverage (Biblical key terms, proper nouns, etc.)
• Semantic coverage (typical domains-specific meanings in the Bible)
• Interpersonal coverage (typical interpersonal/transactional/political/intertextual/etc. meanings in the Bible)
• Information structure, logical structure, etc.

One of the ways to make this data particularly useful would be to ensure that contrastive pairs are included in the data at each level. If one wording presents a pair of objects, then another should present only one object but not the other. If one wording realizes a command activity, then another one should realize a request activity using the same lexical items, etc.

In other words, attempting to control the data at each level ensures that the data addresses specific items of interest in translation. However, this is a bit of a double-edged sword, and the wrong way to do this would be to control for formal, grammatical patterns in the source language that are intentionally left behind in translation (cf. Prioritizing Semantics Over Structures).

Conclusion

The outline above lays out an example of how we might approach the task of Bible translation in a new, undocumented language without both the intimidation that normally accompanies the prospect of translating the Bible itself, and also without the security challenges that are implicated in translating the Bible in hostile contexts.