New Bible translation technology by Wycliffe spreading Gospel faster than ever before

I have not used this software, but have seen it used. It's definitely cutting edge, very powerful, and can shorten the time needed for translating the Bible by years. That is awesome!

A friend of mine is working on similar software that is, IMO, even more usable. Imagine being able to be in America on furlough but able to go online and work on a translation with the nationals! Imagine being able to instantly call up all the times a certain Greek word has been translated, and see how it was rendered in each case. And of course, you can make a dictionary of your target language, and so forth.

A lot of this I have had to do in my head in our project, and in case you haven't noticed, we have holes in our head. Facts leak out mine.

 

Any idea how many more languages need to be translated still?

 

Something like 3,000. To be sure, many of those languages are in Africa, where the lingua franca is English or German. The nationals may wish for a Bible in their own language, but are able to access Bibles in the lingua franca. On the other hand, in places like the S. American, Papua, and Indonesian jungles, there are still tribes without a single verse of the Bible, but yet no lingua franca through which to access God's truth.

 

LOL French is a lingua franca. Literally!

 

Correct, I meant French.

New translation effort--awesome!

 

This is actually a usual situation. Translation consultants typically are not fluent in the target language. They partner with the nationals as experts who can lead the nationals in the syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (the study of meaning) in the original languages, guiding them to the right equivalent words and expressions in the target languages. It is then typical for the consultant to ask for a "back translation" from the target text back into English, so they can evaluate how the work is going.

 

Here is an interesting article from The Bible Translator journal about software. Granted, it is from 2011, which is software terms is ancient, but it is still informative.

 

Here is the website for ParaText software: Paratext 8

 

Then usually the back translation would be into whatever the native tongue of the consultant was. The back translation is simply for the consultant to check how the target language translation is going. Are there words left out or misunderstood? Is the grammar being translated correctly? Have the translators missed the meaning?

 

A humorous anecdote (veracity unknown) on the importance of back-translating concerns two Russians - non-believers with no Bible familiarity - to translate and (separately) back translate Matt. 26:41 as it's often quoted.
Thus "The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" became "The ghost is happy but the meat is spoiled."

 

Another version goes something like this:

Early English-Russian/Russian-English translation programs often mangled well-known expressions. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” came back as “The vodka is fine and the meat is tender.” Similarly, “out of sight, out of mind” became “blind and insane.” With a little tweaking the test returned, “The vodka will do, but the meat is rotten,” and “invisible insanity.”

 

New Bible translation technology by Wycliffe spreading Gospel faster than ever before

"We really need to build up missionaries here in Kenya so we can send them to the United States. You need missionaries so bad."

Our need is not a result of not having a Bible translation in our native language.

 

True, and he may well be right. But I would very much like to know why he thinks so. For example, why wouldn’t he think that other parts of Africa need them far more? Too often it seems the desire is to go to the US not to preach the Gospel but to preach for money.

 

In the Congo and propbably other coutries many speak Russian as the Soviet Union gave free university education to many. We attend a Baptist Church in France when we go for a few days. The first time we went to the church, there was a man from the Belgian Congo who was reading from a Russian Bible.