temala during the First World War era to
sell Spanish Bibles to the indigenous Cak-
chiquel. It was a task doomed for failure
as the Cakchiquel did not speak Spanish.
Abandoning sales, Townsend lived along-
side them in order to learn their language
and customs, expanding his role from mis-
sionary to ethnographer.
In 1934, he founded Camp Wycliffe, a lin-
guistics training school, which expanded
into the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the
Summer Institute of Linguistics a decade
later. Townsend’s vision has now reached
the far corners of the world with 890 Bib-
lical translations completed and hundreds
more progressing towards completion.
TRANSLATING THE HEART
LANGUAGE
The role of the organization is to translate
the Bible into what Eyre termed “the heart
language”, which is simply another word
for mother tongue, but Eyre offered a far
more emotive definition: “Our identity is
wrapped up in it — the idioms, the meta-
6
business elite canada
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MARCH 2016
