JANUARY 2021
VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1
What’s Pressing Publishing Change
from Bi-monthly to Quarterly
Beginning with this issue, we will be sending What’s Pressing once a quarter. You’ll hear from us no more than four times per year. We hope you find this publication an interesting mix of items about publishing globally and SIL publications. Find us in your email box January, April, July and October!
JANUARY SPECIAL PRICING ON NEW TITLES
Making a Difference: Bible Translation among the Dagomba and Konkomba of Northern Ghana

Solomon Sumani Sule-Saa with Joyce Park

How did two very different language communities encounter and make early choices about Christianity? This book is a historical record of the Dagomba and Konkomba people groups of Northern Ghana as they embraced the Bible translated into their mother tongues.

Author Dr. Sumani Sule-Saa employs Professor Lamin Sanneh's groundbreaking hermeneutic of "mission as translation" as a grid to examine the effect of Bible translation on the lives of these two very important language groups.

$29.95
Retails for $45.95
Traduire la Bible, the French translation of Bible Translation Basics, will be published within a few weeks in both paperback and in ePub formats, available on Amazon and other online distributors. Order now at its special pre-publication price!
Traduire la Bible : Comment s'y prendre

Harriet Hill, Ernst-August Gutt, Margaret Hill, Christoph Unger, Rick Floyd

Au cours des trente dernières années, les chercheurs ont fait des progrès significatifs dans la compréhension du fonctionnement de la communication humaine. Au départ, il fallait rechercher le sens dans les textes seuls. A présent, les chercheurs considèrent que les textes fournissent des indices qui amènent les auditeurs à découvrir le sens voulu par le locuteur. Les auditeurs utilisent d’autres sources de renseignement ainsi que des choses qu’ils connaissent déjà et des informations provenant de l’environnement du discours, pour comprendre non seulement les mots du texte mais aussi ce que le locuteur communique. Tout cela a des implications importantes pour la traduction de la Bible.
$34.95
Retails for $49.95
Available now:
Bible Translation Basics: Communicating Scripture in a Relevant Way

Harriet Hill, Ernst-August Gutt, Margaret Hill, Christoph Unger, Rick Floyd

Over the past thirty years, scholars have made significant advances in understanding how human communication functions. They have moved from looking for meaning in texts alone to seeing texts as providing clues that lead hearers to discover the speaker's intended meaning. Hearers use other inputs as well—things they already know, information from the speech environment—as they search to understand not only what the words of the text say but also what the speaker is communicating. All this has significant implications for Bible translation. Read more about the book here.
$23.95
Retails for $34.50
*Date may be earlier or later depending on delays caused by Covid-19. No pick up; shipping only. Orders received after February 19, 2021 will not be filled.
All sale prices are in USD. Tax and shipping are extra. All sales final.
Italy’s Pandemic Year "Why I Read" Campaign Soars

In Feature Articles by Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives, January 4, 2021
The results of the AIE’s fifth annual #IoLeggoPerché book donation program for schools and libraries has surprised organizers with 300,000 books.
Image by press 👍 and ⭐ from Pixabay
There was concern going in that the program might stumble under the burden of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. “We weren’t sure we would be up and running in this year of emergency and difficulties,” AIE chief Ricardo Franco Levi said, “but we have risen to this great challenge with the precise aim of supporting our schools.”
 
And as it turns out, he and his fellow organizers need not have worried. Read about the results.
Father Reginald Foster Used Latin to Bring History Into the Present
By Ted Scheinman SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, December 30, 2020

Who speaks Latin these days? A surprisingly large number of people, thanks to the late friar, who died on Christmas Day at 81.
"Reginald Foster succeeded in reversing the decline in living Latin. He actually, really, genuinely did it. Reggie's success is total: There is a burgeoning movement and critical mass of young people who have now learned Latin [as a spoken language]. Reggie taught some, his students taught some, those people are teaching some, and on and on. Some of the best Latinists in the world are in their 20s or early 30s"—a remarkable development that Fontaine credits squarely to Foster’s peerless influence.
—Excerpted paragraph by Michael Fontaine, an administrator and professor of Classics at Cornell University. The whole story is worth reading.

What’s Pressing Editor: This is a story about Latin, but also about teaching, and also about engaging students. I suspect my four years of Latin would have enjoyed the status of “favorite high school subject” had I learned from Father Reginald Foster.
Who Invented the Alphabet?
By Lydia Wilson Smithsonian Magazine, January/February 2021

New scholarship points to a paradox of historic scope: Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read
Centuries before Moses wandered in the “great and terrible wilderness” of the Sinai Peninsula, this triangle of desert wedged between Africa and Asia attracted speculators, drawn by rich mineral deposits hidden in the rocks. And it was on one of these expeditions, around 4,000 years ago, that some mysterious person or group took a bold step that, in retrospect, was truly revolutionary. Scratched on the wall of a mine is the very first attempt at something we use every day: the alphabet. Read the rest of the story.
Library of Congress Completes Digitization of 23 Early Presidential Collections
Completion of Project Includes Latest Digitization of Papers of Presidents Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge

DECEMBER 17, 2020 Press Contact: Brett Zongker, bzongker@loc.gov | Leah Knobel, lknobel@loc.gov
The Library of Congress has completed a more than two decade-long initiative to digitize the papers of nearly two dozen early presidents. The Library holds the papers of 23 presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, all of which have been digitized and are now available online.

The Library plans to highlight each presidential collection on social media in the weeks leading up to the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2021. The story includes a link for each presidential collection, with the papers divided into separate collections. This is a treasure trove of information and documents, read it all (or parts) here.
We publish What’s Pressing no more than four times per year. Most issues feature a sale item as well as news from the worlds of publishing, academic writing, linguistics, or translation, at times including some items just for fun.

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