Mamadou was a Senegalese scholar and Bible translator who worked with an American member of WorldVenture named Marilyn to translate the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible into Wolof. Several times in the mid-2010s as they translated different books of the Bible, Marilyn’s WorldVenture teammate Steve produced voice recordings of Mamadou reading the Scriptures.

Mamadou’s recordings were phenomenal, especially as he knew the text so well, and he was a great reader as well as writer. His voice expressed tremendous emotion and his storytelling was superb. His dramatization of the conversations between Moses and God at the burning bush makes the text come alive. His renditions of the Psalms in Wolof turn the text into spoken poetry.

Mamadou continued work on the translation and completed the last revision of the New Testament just days before he was admitted to the hospital and passed away in August of 2021.

Now as Marilyn and Corey are nearing the completion of the typesetting of the Wolof Bible, they and Steve are thinking about the importance of having a recording of the whole Bible to include in the Wolof Bible app and for other media such as videos. During the past months, almost every conversation between Corey and the team about audio has begun with a lament that Mamadou isn’t here to complete the recording because he was just so good! It was especially frustrating since they estimate that only about 5% of the final translation differs from the text he recorded. What a waste to have to throw that all away and start over from the beginning! Not to mention the difficulty of having to find another reader who could read as well as Mamadou did…

This past week, we were amazed to hear of an unexpected solution. Corey and Steve had a meeting with someone from the Artificial Intelligence department of a ministry called Faith Comes by Hearing (FCBH). They have an AI tool that can take a book recorded in Mamadou’s voice – say, Genesis – with some number of verses different in the middle, and make a clone of Mamadou’s voice. Then another mother-tongue Wolof speaker can re-record just the verses that have differences from the recorded version. FCBH can clone those re-recorded verses to match Mamadou’s voice, and then we can replace just those missing verses with the new verses. This means that we can keep Mamadou’s amazing voice work and also speed up the release of the final audio Bible books as he had already recorded about a third of the Bible, and going back into the studio to re-record a small percentage of the total will be much faster than re-recording the whole thing! How amazing is that!?

I often think of how God used the roads paved by the Romans, and the increased mobility of that time period, to aid in the spread of the Gospel back in the early days of the church. Now in our own times, we see God using the new technology of our day in a similar way to facilitate the spread of His Word! All Praise to Him!

Please continue to pray for the completion of the typesetting of the Wolof Bible which has taken much longer than expected. Pray for God to send out His Word among Wolof all over Senegal and around the world!  

Corey and Katie