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Kam New Testament, 1st, 2006Hans Grass of RFLR Germany started preparatory work on a (Southern) Kam translation in early 1996. The first Kam associate in this endeavour was Lǐ Fēng 李锋, a native Northern Kam speaker. Although Northern and Southern Kam are hardly intelligible to each other, they managed to produce a trial version of the whole New Testament in January 1998, shortly before Hans Grass’s first furlough. Hans Grass carried out individual revisions after 1998, but real progress had to wait until 2002, when two older Kam cultural workers, Zhāng Xiǎoguāng 张晓光 (Róngjiāng 榕江) and Wú Qiáng 吴强 (Sānjiāng 三江), performed a complete overhaul of the manuscript. During the autumn, winter and spring of 2002–2003 they worked through several rounds of revisions and improved a wide range of key terms. Following these rounds, three young Christian farmers from Sānjiāng 三江 county tested their understanding of the manuscript by back-translating the text into Chinese. The outcome was successful. They completed this test phase just before the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak caused a range of travel restrictions in China, in May 2003. Over 20 months later, in 2005, two final rounds of revisions were performed. The Kam editor of a publishing house in Guìyáng, Yáng Jiàn 杨建, revised the manuscript to prepare it for publication. About a year later in 2006, the Verlag für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft in Nürnberg, Germany, published the first New Testament and had 5,000 copies printed in Hong Kong. The New Testament was edited as a Kam/Chinese diglot using the Romanised Kam script created by the Chinese Government in 1956 and the text of the Chinese Union Version (Hèhébĕn Version). Where Sānjiāng 三江 vocabulary diverges from the official Róngjiāng 榕江dialect, the Kam New Testament marks these differences in the text.

Android Smartphones

Hans Grass, together with the programmer Moses Chen and the designer Jens Weigel, developed a mobile application of the New Testament. This application is text-only as no audio recordings have been made so far. The application can switch between a monolingual and bilingual display.

Start Screen Bilingual Text Keyterm Search Hit List

Website

Hans Grass, Moses Chen and Jens Weigel, also developed a web application. Person and place names are marked in different colors. Both applications integrate a list of 4,000 key terms which can be searched in the New Testament. The web application also lists these items according to semantic groups.

Interlinked Text Display Built-in Dictionary

Interactive Mediterranean MapFurthermore, Hans Grass and Michael Siegel of Rutgers Cartography (New Jersey) developed interactive maps of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea which allow users to track ancient places by the Bible verses which mention them.