Consider a year-end gift to our Wycliffe Ministry! (abidinginhesed.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=db546fcb26a533fdfc86dbb4a&id=026f645794&e=aea6dceb05)
** Thanksgiving ————————————————————
In our house, we get a white pumpkin at the beginning of November and each evening after dinner we write what we are thankful for on it. At Thanksgiving we read it off.
This year, one of the things that I’d like to encourage you to be thankful for (with me) is the wealth of biblical resources available in English. Aside from vast libraries full of physical books, multiple websites offer a wealth of English Bible translations, older commentaries, and Hebrew and Greek tools. A few free pieces of software do similarly, and for $10-20/month or $50-$1,000s of dollars you can buy almost any text or commentary or guide you can imagine, ancient or modern, and use them in very powerful applications.
Even in those places where English is a national language and there’s 100s of languages remaining that need Bibles, this hasn’t really translated into access for local Bible translators. And for those who speak a different second language it’s even more difficult. There’s various reasons for this, including limited internet access, limited financial resources making it difficult to have up-to-date computers or tablets, copyrighted resources, and resources being often offered only on specific platforms or applications which may have required permission (due to copyright).
Over the last several years there have been two pushes that are working to overcome those hurdles. One is a greater push for all the Bible translation agencies to put their data and resources together so we can be aware of each other’s work and work together on projects instead of finding out later that we were working in parallel. Another has been a push to open license resources for the global church.
One fruit of combining and opening things up is the Bible Well webpage (abidinginhesed.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=db546fcb26a533fdfc86dbb4a&id=06cc22b74d&e=aea6dceb05) . Here, in a simple interface, translators (and anyone else) can access free resources for drafting translations, checking translations, and more (including Study Bible notes from Tyndale (NLT) and Biblica (NIV)). Just a moment ago I was browsing through and was really intrigued by what I found in the Music article from Tyndale’s Bible Dictionary (found by going to Psalm 1, Resources tab, and scrolling down to that section). There was a lot in there I didn’t know, including that in the temple they sang a daily Psalm: 24, 48, 82, 94, 81, 93, and 92 from Sunday-Sabbath respectively. We might incorporate that into our family worship!
Several of the resources on that site were very difficult for translators to access until very recently, access was hard and copyright meant you couldn’t do anything with it. But now anybody with a web browser has access to all of this, and those with limited internet access can come to town and pre-download whatever they need and it will still function when they return home. Furthermore, if you wanted to use those resources for a sermon or Sunday school or Bible study, you can copy them directly or rework them as you like, simply crediting the source and linking back to the original. Under copyright you’d have to go through a long approval process to do such things (even to translate them). Speaking of translation, computer based translation between the most strategic languages (those with the most second language speakers who still need Bibles) is making it so that these English resources will very soon be available to second language speakers of many other languages.
So why all this about the Bible Well? First, it’s an exciting resource that people have said, “Our partners have been so excited to use this for Bible study.” But also, it’s the main resource we tried to equip the teams in Liberia with.
** Liberia ————————————————————
So, the recent Liberia trip was a bit frustrating honestly, and I’ve been struggling with how to share about it. I was a bit apprehensive going in because there was a distinct lack of clarity and communication. I think the experience has taught me to push a bit harder on some questions before committing or going. However, perhaps sometimes as a consultant, when a couple of organizations are asking you to come and help, you have to go and figure out what they need and help them how you can.Liberia may not objectively be the poorest place I’ve gone, but it felt like it. Perhaps it was because it was my first outdoor venue. But it really came out at the end of the workshop when the pastor teams gave their feedback. For instance, some said that people would ask them how many meals a day they ate while at the workshop, others said they didn’t have power to charge the tablets they were given to work on the translations (never mind internet), others pointed out the financial difficulties of traveling to the different towns of their people to work on the translation drafts. Some fun exercises to get us awake again an hour after lunch.
They were understandably frustrated. As a training team we understood that they would have tablets and a particular app they were using for translation. These tablets and the app are provided by an organization involved in the project, perhaps driving it to some extent. However, when we arrived none of this was prepared and so the pastors got to fight with the technology and the internet along with us all week instead of being handed something that was all prepared to function fully offline. (The Bible Well functions well off-line, but it still takes time and a lot of data to download three gospels and Acts worth of resources.) The first night as we tried to set up 27 tablets, we had a router that crashed every time a device connected to it.
So instead of two good days of training and two good days of implementing checking procedures on the text their translators had drafted, we spun our wheels a lot. As a training team, we gave them as much conceptually as we could. It was encouraging at the end of Wednesday to hear them articulate back to us many of the things we were teaching, but frustrating that we never really got to walk them through the process and let them do it while we could check-in with them and help them tweak their work.
As we begin the season of Advent and make our way toward Christmas, wait and hope with us for the Church around the world to be able to plumb the depths of the hope the Bible holds for the people of God. Consider a year-end gift to our Wycliffe Ministry! (abidinginhesed.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=db546fcb26a533fdfc86dbb4a&id=8b7a9e21fb&e=aea6dceb05)
** Thank you for all your prayers, gifts, and encouragements over the last year! ————————————————————
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If you wish to mail contributions send them to: Wycliffe Bible Translators, P.O. Box 628200, Orlando, Fl 32862-8200 Checks should be made out to Wycliffe Bible Translators, with a separate note that says “preference for the Wycliffe ministry of Benjamin & Shanna Wright, account #227489”