30-year effort yields Bolinao Bible

A BOOK that took 30 years to make: the Bible in Bolinao. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

DAGUPAN CITY—After more than 30 years, the first Bible translation in Bolinao, a language spoken in the western Pangasinan towns of Bolinao and Anda, has been completed.

The translation project started in the late 1970s when an American couple working for the Wycliffe Bible Translators based in San Francisco, California, was assigned to the Philippine Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Gary and Diane Persons, who were based in Minnesota, chose Bolinao (also called “Binubolinao”) as the language into which to translate the scriptures.

The couple arrived in the Philippines in 1977 and the following year was learning Bolinao by communicating with residents and reading local literature, said Harrison Caasi, 75, a member of the translation review committee.

When the Personses were ready, they started to translate the Bible, aided by Rhoda Carolino and Emerita Caasi, and later by Nery Zamora of the Bible Association of the Philippines.

The Bolinao Bible was launched in the island town of Anda (pop: 34,398 as of 2007) on October 29 and in Bolinao (pop: 75,545 as of 2010) on October 30.

Caasi said Gary Persons, the project’s head linguist, attended the launch and addressed the crowd using the Bolinao language.

Diane died in a vehicular accident while another translator, Carolino, died several years ago.

“While the Persons couple pioneered the translation work, they actually conferred with different sectors to come up with an accurate translation,” said Caasi, a pastor of Jewish Carpenter Methodist Church.

He said the translation team used the original Greek scriptures as its main reference and consulted other translations. The review committee, he said, had to go over the translation to check for grammatical errors and context, “which is why it took too long to complete the work,” he said.

He said that aside from making the Bible available to locals, the Bolinao Bible may help in preserving the language, which is relegated to the sidelines by Ilocano and Tagalog.

Fred Castelo, Bolinao town administrator, said only 25 percent of the town’s population speak Bolinao.

He said Bolinao speakers are found in nine villages in the town, six of them in Santiago Island.

Persons, in a message he wrote for the silver anniversary souvenir program of the Bolinao Historical and Cultural Society Inc. in 1989, said the project was “motivated by the love of God and is aimed at sharing His words through the translation of the scriptures into the common language of the people of Bolinao.”