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.

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