Amish Romance

At first glance, I would have thought this was a satirical book cover from The Onion, what with its Hollywood-gorgeous model, the title almost looks like it's not real words and devoid of meaning, the empty claim of being a "New York Times Bestselling Author" — but, no, this is the real deal.   Amish romance novels are a thing, and a big thing at that. It goes to show that having a devoted and book-hungry subgenre will do an author good, and this genre wins because of its cross-genre appeal.  Both the Amish themselves and Evangelical Christians love the books for their strict adherence to morals and faith, with a healthy dollop of romance on top.  So, really, not much different than the "true romance" magazines from the fifties and sixties, which adhered to Hayes-code style punishment for transgressors and rewards for those true of heart, but set in an idealized world of bonnets and buggies — a callback to historical romances.  It's no wonder that Amish Romances, as a genre, have such appeal: they're cobbled together from some of the most successful aspects of romance fiction from the past fifty years.

De Nyew Testament In Gullah

Someone over at Reddit found themselves a copy of De Nyew Testament at their used book store:

Just the snippet shown there, you can get one aspect of translation:  it's about context, and not just finding the right word.   One of my "projects" that I've been working on, off-and-on, for two years now is correcting an English translation of a French book that I very much enjoyed but had some trouble reading.  Quite often, the translator just picked the first word in their French-to-English dictionary, resulting in some confusing and somewhat amusing sentences.  And, if there's one book that is constantly and enthusiastically debated over the context in a translation, it's the Bible, so you know some thought went into producing the Gullah version.  If you'd like to see de hole Nyew Testament, you can read the same version pictured online at gullahbible.com., or if you can't get there because Reddit is hitting them hard, it's also available here or here.