Skip to main content

Community Checking of Scripture Products



You may have heard of Wycliffe Associate USA's attempts to get into the world of Bible translation using a technique they call MAST - mobilized assistance supporting translation. It's not my purpose to critique that approach, as that's already been done by others such as Christianity Today.

Instead I want to talk about one aspect of their approach which I view very positively - that of community checking of the translation. Basically, if the community or a large representative group of it is involved in checking the translation is is far more likely to be used than otherwise. You might be working in a region where there is opposition to the gospel? Well, you can still do community checking, via the local churches in that region. Send your drafts to as many believers as you can! Get feedback, and get people involved (this is often called 'reviewing' but is a kind of check)! It needs to be their translation.

The danger of not involving the community at the checking stage is that when the translation comes out the people the translation is intended for will reject it as 'not ours'.

MAST may be too fast, and a bit slapdash, but it is likely to produce translations that are engaged with, albeit ones that aren't as accurate as others worked on for a longer time with sustained input from well-trained consultants.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Flow Chart for Bible Translation (a Relevance Theory Approach)

One of the current theories behind modern translation work is Relevance Theory. [1] Here is a flow chart that explains the process often used to produce a draft when using such an approach: *Make sure your translation committee makes the decision as to what kind of translation they want. A domesticated translation is one that submits to dominant values in the target language [2] whereas a foreignized translation is one that is happy to import foreign terms and ideas from Hebrew, Greek, or the language of wider communication such as the Greek term baptizo . The chart looks something like this: Text                                   Communicated Ideas                  Context A sower went out to sow  A farmer went out to sow grain   People scattered/threw seed etc. The text has very little information, but behind i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Asking the Right Questions in Bible Translation and Scripture Engagement Planning

If you want to get useful answers you have to ask the right questions. Do you agree? Yes, of course you do. In the Bible translation world we often ask a very narrow question when planning for the next stage of work: 'What would you like to see translated next?' Now, if you simply want to translate, and that's it, that question is fine, but what if you want to see some kind of result from your translation work? What if, for instance, you want to see transformation occur? Then a more powerful question to ask the community and positive stakeholders in the project would be: 'What kingdom goals would you like to see reached?' These kingdom goals should meet felt needs of the community - they should solve problems that are apparent to most or all in the community. See below on how those can be met. If that's too abstract, then try, 'What kinds of things, in your extended family, do you tend to worry about?' This will help establish some felt needs, from which...
7 comments
Read more

Integral Mission vs. Holistic Mission - What's the Difference?

 A lot of people are talking about integral mission these days, whereas the idea of holistic mission seems to have fallen by the wayside. What's the difference? Holistic mission is mission to the whole person, taking into account their physical as well as spiritual needs. Evangelism is combined with social action. Unfortunately, this term has been used for some years now, and much mission that was labelled 'holistic' was mainly social action. Integral mission has more focus on communities and their felt needs. What issues of poverty and (lack of) justice are there? How can a given community begin to address these issues? What input do they need from outsiders as they do so? How can they define kingdom goals that will bring them out of their physical and spiritual poverty? Lausanne defines it here . The fact is that the neediest communities are often ones that lack the Bible, and lack a clear orthography (alphabet corresponding to the phonemic system of the language, and tha...
Post a Comment
Read more