Many decades ago when I was about 5, I shared a room with my sister. I was at the age when everything around me was new and exciting. And I was determined to figure things out on my own. My favourite weapon in this game was the question “WHY?” and with lots of adults around, I was always learning. But always asking “Why?” drove my older sister crazy. One night as we were supposed to be nodding off to sleep, I was still firing one question after another at her. Eventually, exasperated by my relentless persistence, she blurted out, “If you ask ‘why?’ one more time, the angels will come from heaven and throw you in the fire.” Yup, you guessed it… “Why?” came my curious, but daring reply. And I lived on to tell this tale!

Curiosity has always been my friend. I’ve always wondered why we do what we do, or why we go about doing what we do in the way that we do. And this has often resulted in changing what we do, or how we do it.

With a background in Computer Systems Engineering I have always wanted to squeeze more out of computers for the sake of fulfilling our God-given mission to ensure that everyone on the planet has access to his Holy Word. And if you know anything about translation work, you will know that it is a long and painstaking process with numerous steps along the way to ensure that God’s Word is clear, accurate, natural and acceptable to the communities for whom it is being translated. There are at least a dozen different software packages that we use for day-to-day language development, literacy and translation work; and several dozen other apps that we use for specialized tasks within the wider process.

Before I start using a piece of software, I come back to my friend WHY and ask what it is going to do for me that I can’t already do myself through some other manual way. The software should either make the task at hand easier, or quicker, or more accurate, or enhance the process in another way, like enabling others to join in with the task to achieve a better end result. If I can’t answer that WHY question, then I’d be better off doing it manually.

I recall using a piece of cutting-edge grammatical analysis software (called Lingualinks) while we were training to be Bible translators. It was a wonderful tool and made some of the steps of discovering patterns in a language a fun process. But, when it came to getting those results out of the program and into our grammatical write-ups, we were hamstrung. There was no reasonable way of doing so! Why? Perhaps no one had followed the logical progression of what should be done with the data after making all these wonderful discoveries. So with a bit of spare time over a few weekends I cobbled together a program to extract that complex data and import it into our grammatical writeups in Word. Everyone on the course was delighted to have a tool to help them re-use the data that they had carefully entered into Lingualinks - and it made their write-ups far easier to write, and more accurate too.

On another occasion, before home printers could print in booklet format, pagination software was unaffordable and rather complicated. We worked out a way forward by writing a Word macro to do the magic for you. That enabled teams to create their own booklets locally for testing and feedback. Twenty years ago that was groundbreaking!

A few years later, Unicode - a globally accepted standard for encoding every written script on the planet - was introduced. This was welcome news, but what about all the scriptures that had already been keyed in with pre-Unicode fonts? Everyone was being told that these materials would have to be re-keyed into the computer to be in the right Unicode-compliant format. Why? Because there wasn’t a solution available to transfer their data from one standard to another. Well, why not? Because no one has needed it before! Well, then, why don’t we build the bridge? And so it was. I worked alongside a far more gifted programmer colleague to build an Encoding Converter which would do exactly that - take old legacy data and transform it into new Unicode data saving people from having to retype it, and re-proofread the contents. Thousands of hours of work were saved, and that tool is now embedded inside all sorts of other software that we use. For example, if you need to publish the same scripture in more than one script, you can call that software to do it for you - it converts an entire Bible in a matter of seconds.

I could go on - there are half a dozen other “inventions” that I designed to solve specific problems we’ve encountered on our journey of doing translation with Wycliffe in South Asia. One of the things that drives me, apart from “creative laziness”, is the realization that solving a problem that our team is facing could have a much wider impact on the global family of translators all around the world. So it is always worth asking the Why? question, because you never know where that train of thought might take you.

My sister’s theology might have been a little bit mixed up, or perhaps the story of Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego had warped her perception of reality, but thankfully it wasn’t enough to shut me up. I’m still asking WHY?

Pioneering Kiwis tend to have this much-needed quality of noticing when something’s not quite right and then the attitude to ask, “Well, why not?”. Often this leads them to embark on a process to solve the problem that no one else seems to have noticed. If nothing else, the WHY question forces others around us to pause and think about whether there's a better way to do what we’re doing. This can be a wonderful gift to the world of Bible translation.