Dear Friends,

Warm greetings from Taitung on the southeast coast of Taiwan.

Paiwan Bible translation team

The past three weeks I’ve been working in partnership with the Paiwan, Amis and Bunun teams checking and adjusting their ongoing Bible translations. Over the next two weeks I have checking sessions with the Pinuyumayan and Tayal teams, plus a couple of more days with the Amis team. Each project is progressing well.

This afternoon at the request of the PCT’s Indigenous Committee to Promote Mother-Languages, I submitted a selection of Bible passages which the PCT will use to test the indigenous language abilities of this year’s seminary graduates and evangelists before they can be ordained. The same applies for Hakka and Taiwanese grads. No basic ability in your ancestral language, no ordination. People can take the language test as many times as necessary until they pass it.

Amis Bible translation team

Yesterday, Friday May 26, 2017, we heard great news on Taiwan’s Indigenous TV channel (similar to APTN in Canada), that at long last the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s national law-making assembly) has passed the third and final reading of the Aboriginal Language Development Act. You can read more about it at:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/print/2017/05/27/2003671380

(For background info on Taiwan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples (台灣原住民族委員會), see:
http://www.apc.gov.tw/portal/index.html?lang=en_US )

Last year President Tsai Ying-wen made an official apology on behalf of the national government of Taiwan for the many wrongs and injustices that have been committed against Taiwan’s indigenous people’s for centuries, in particular, since the 1940s when the KMT fled China, occupied Taiwan and imposed its Mandarin-only language policy in education, the media and government bodies. People hope the government will put good words into positive action on behalf of all Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

Tayal village in the north central mountains

Since the 1950s the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Bible Society in Taiwan have worked together to share the Gospel and translate the Bible, hymns and songs using indigenous languages. The PCC began direct support for this work through Clare and Grace McGill when they helped translate hymns and the New Testament into the Tayal language, 1959-1984. More recently, the PCC has been supporting my work with indigenous Bible translation teams since 2012.

Today over 500 congregations in the PCT are indigenous, representing a dozen different language groups. Most of these churches continue to use their own ancestral language to read the parts of the Bible translated thus far and to sing praises to God. However, past government opposition to indigenous languages, the confiscation of indigenous Bibles in the 1970s, and the pervasive use of Mandarin in schools since the 1950s, have had negative impact on PCT indigenous churches.

Sunrise over Taitung city, home to many Amis & Pinuyumayan people. Pacific Ocean and Green Island on the horizon.

We hope and pray this Aboriginal Language Development Act, along with ongoing Bible translation work and the PCT’s efforts to train indigenous pastors and evangelists, will help preserve and promote the use of Taiwan’s beautiful indigenous languages, and be a blessing to indigenous churches and families from the high mountains to the ocean shores, in traditional rural villages or industrial and urban centres.