The Translation Manual contains the following sections:
Note: These terms are used in this manual. The translator will need to understand these terms in order to use the Translation Manual.
The terms are listed below in four categories: "Translation," "Translation Products," "Texts," and "Grammar and Figures of Speech."
Translation - The process of expressing in the form of a target language the same meaning that a writer or speaker expressed in the form of a source language.
Original Language - The language in which a Bible text was initially written. The original language of the New Testament is Greek. The original language of most of the Old Testament is Hebrew. However, the original language of some parts of Daniel and Ezra is Aramaic. The original language is always the most accurate language from which to translate a passage.
Source Language - The language from which the translation is being made.
Source Text- The text from which the translation is being made.
Target Language - The language into which a translation is being made.
Target Text- The text being made by the translator as he or she translates the meaning from the source text.
Language of Wider Communication - A language that is spoken over a broad area and by many people. For most people, this is not their first language, but is the language that they use to speak to people outside of their language community. Some people call this a trade language. Most Bibles will be translated using a language of wider communication as the source language.
Heart language - Someone's heart language is the language in which they are most comfortable and which they use to express their deepest thoughts. It is usually the language they first spoke as a child and the language which they use at home.
Heart Language Translation - A heart language (HL) translation is a translation into the heart language of its intended users.
Gateway Language Translation - A gateway language (GL) translation is a translation into a language of wider communication, and is meant to be a source text for bilingual people to translate into their heart language. (The GL translation is not meant for people who speak that language as their heart language.)
Literal Translation - A translation that focuses on reproducing the form of the source text in the target text, even if the meaning changes as a result.
Meaning-based Translation (or Dynamic Translation) - A translation that focuses on reproducing the meaning of the source text in the target text, even if the form changes as a result.
Biblical Content - The Bible and other materials that help people understand and apply the Bible to their lives, such as “Open Bible Stories,” Bible dictionaries, Bible study materials, and scripture memory programs.
End-user Bible - This is a Bible that people have translated so that it speaks in a natural way in the target language. It is meant to be used in churches and homes. In contrast, the ULB and UDB are Bibles that are translation tools. They do not speak naturally in any language, because the ULB is a literal translation and the UDB avoids using idioms and figures of speech, which a natural translation would use. Using these translation tools, a translator can produce an end-user Bible.
Term - A word or phrase that refers to one thing, idea, or action. For example, the term in English for pouring liquid into one's mouth is "drink." The term for a ceremony that marks an important transition in someone's life is "rite of passage." The difference between a term and a word is that a term can contain several words.
Text - A text is something that a speaker or writer is communicating to a hearer or reader by means of language. The speaker or writer has a certain meaning in mind, and so he or she chooses a form of the language to express that meaning.
Passage - A section of the Bible text that is being talked about. This can be as small as one verse, but it is usually several verses that together have one topic or tell one story.
Context - The words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs surrounding the word, phrase, or sentence in question. The context is the text that surrounds the part of the text that you are examining. The meaning of individual words and phrases can change when they are in different contexts.
Form - The structure of the language as it appears on the page or as it is spoken. "Form" refers to the way that the language is arranged-it includes the words, the word order, the grammar, idioms, and any other features of the structure of the text.
Meaning - The underlying idea or concept that the text is trying to communicate to the reader or hearer. A speaker or writer can communicate the same meaning by using different forms of the language, and different people can understand different meanings from hearing or reading the same language form. In this way you can see that form and meaning are not the same thing.
Grammar - The way that sentences are put together in a language. This has to do with the order of its various parts, such as if the verb goes first or last or in the middle.
Noun - A kind of word that refers to a person, place, or thing. A proper noun is the name of a person or place. An abstract noun is a thing that we cannot see or touch, like "peace" or "unity." It refers to an idea or a state of being. Some languages do not use abstract nouns.
Verb - A kind of word that refers to an action, like "walk" or "arrive."
Modifier - A kind of word that says something about another word. Both adjectives and adverbs are modifiers.
Adjective - A kind of word that says something about a noun. For example, the word "tall" says something about the noun "man" in the following sentence. I see a tall man.
Adverb - A kind of word that says something about a verb. For example, the word "loudly" says something about the verb "spoke" in the following sentence. The man spoke loudly to the crowd of people.
Participant - A participant is one of the actors in a sentence. This could be the person doing the action, or the person that is receiving the action, or mentioned as participating in some way. A participant could even be an object that is stated as participating in the action of the sentence. For example, in the following sentence, the participants are underlined: John and Mary sent a letter to Andrew. Sometimes participants are left unstated, but they are still part of the action. In this case, the participant is implied. For example, in the following sentence, there are only two participants stated: Andrew received a letter. The senders, John and Mary, are implied. In some languages, the implied participants must be stated.
Idiom - An expression that uses several words and that means something different as a whole than it would if the words were understood with the meanings that they have when they are used separately. Idioms cannot be translated literally, that is, with the meanings of the separate words. For example, "he kicked the bucket" is an idiom in English that means "he died."
This section introduces church-owned Bible translation. It has the following topics:
Church-owned Bible translation (COBT) is a paradigm for Bible translation based on the following beliefs about the local church. We define "local church" as a community of believers who have the same heart language.
The key elements of church-owned Bible translation are:
Translating God's Word into your language to help your people grow as disciples of Jesus is an important task. You must be committed to this task, take your responsibility seriously, and pray that the Lord will help you.
God has spoken to us in the Bible. He inspired the writers of the Bible to write his Word using the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek languages. There were about 40 different authors writing from around 1400 B.C. to A.D. 100. These documents were written in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. By recording his Word in those languages, God ensured that the people at those times and in those places could understand it.
Today, people in your country do not understand Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. But translating God's Word into their language will enable them understand it!
Someone's "mother tongue" or "heart language" is the language they first spoke as a child and the one which they use at home. This is the language in which they are most comfortable and which they use to express their deepest thoughts. We want everyone to be able to read God's Word in their heart language.
Every language is important and valuable. Small languages are just as important as the national languages spoken in your country, and they can express meaning just as well. No one should be ashamed to speak his own dialect. Sometimes, those in minority groups feel ashamed of their language and try not to use it around the people who are in the majority in their nation. But there is nothing inherently more important, more prestigious, or more educated about the national language than the local languages. Each language has nuances and shades of meaning that are unique. We should use the language we are most comfortable with and with which we best communicate with others.
Our Statement of Faith consists of the following essential beliefs.
We consider essential beliefs to be those that define us as believers in Jesus Christ. These cannot be disregarded or compromised.
We believe:
Peripheral beliefs are those beliefs based on Scripture where sincere believers may have disagreements in their interpretation. These include areas such as modes of baptism, the rapture, the second coming of Christ, the Lord’s Supper and church practices. On peripheral beliefs, we can agreeably accept differences.
All contributors to the Bible In Every Language website (see https://bibleineverylanguage.org) agree to translate the Bible in harmony with standard Christian doctrine as expressed in the Statement of Faith.
The divine familial terms are the words "Father" and "Son" when they refer to God the Father and God the Son. God is divine, and these terms show their family relationship to each other. Whenever the words "Father" and "Son" are used in the Bible to refer to the relationship between God the Father and God the Son (or between God the Father and Jesus Christ), they should be translated with the literal, ordinary words that people use to show the relationship between a man and his own son without qualification. That is, translators should not add words that imply that God is not really Jesus’ Father and that Jesus is not really God’s Son, such as “spiritual Father” and “spiritual Son." (See: Translating Son and Father and Son of God and God the Father.) All contributors to the Bible In Every Language website agree to do this.
The goal of the translation of biblical content is to produce a high-quality translation that is used and loved by the church. High-quality translations are accurate, clear, and natural (see Qualities of a Good Translation). But for a translation to be used and loved by the church, it must be church-affirmed. This means that the local church recognizes it to be the Word of God and desires to use it.
In order to produce a translation that the church affirms, as many church networks as possible should be contacted and encouraged to become a part of the translation project and to send some of their people to be a part of the translation team. They should be consulted and asked for their input into the translation project, its goals, and its process. They should be involved in distributing the translation, reviewing it, and providing feedback so it can be refined. The more involved they are in these processes, the more likely they will affirm the translation.
If the church cannot actively lead the translation and coordinate all the efforts, it is necessary that whoever is leading the translation be affirmed by the church networks, preferably before they even start.
After the translators have checked the quality of their translation, they are encouraged to share it with the community and the church leaders so that they can review the translation and give feedback. Encouraging the community and as many church networks as possible to participate and give input will encourage them to own and affirm the translation. And if they do this, there should be nothing hindering the translation from being used to strengthen and encourage the church.
Bible translations that are collaborative are those that have been translated by a group of speakers of the same language. To ensure that your translation is of the highest quality, work together with other believers who speak your language to translate, check, and distribute the translated content.
Collaboration occurs in many ways during the translation process. First, as the team gathers from different churches and villages, they commit to collaborate on the project as a whole. Second, as translators on the team translate portions of scripture, they work with other translators on the team to check their translation and improve it. Third, the translators collaborate with community members and church leaders who read or listen to the scripture and provide feedback about how the translation can be improved.
Whenever possible the translation team should endeavor to include other Christians from their language group in the translation process, so as to continue and expand on the collaborative nature of the project.
Bible translations should be ongoing. That is, even after a Bible translation is published, the church and the translators should understand that the translation will need to be revised sometime in the future. There are various reasons a translation might need to be revised:
The language community may choose to continue to have a translation committee that is responsible for making any revisions. This committee could be made up of Bible translators, Bible scholars, church leaders, and others.
The church should encourage people to read the translation at home and in groups, and to tell a church leader or the translation committee if there appears to be a problem in the translation. The committee is then responsible for determining whether or not a change is needed and how to make it. The committee will need to decide which issues to deal with immediately and which ones to deal with at a later time.
The committee will continue to make corrections to the translation so that it will communicate the same meaning as the source text, and so that it will be more accurate, more clear, and more natural than it was before.
To achieve unrestricted biblical content in every language, a license is needed that gives the global Church "unrestricted" access. We believe this movement will become unstoppable when the Church has unrestricted access. The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) provides all the needed rights for translation and distribution of biblical content and ensures that the content remains open. Except where otherwise noted, all our content is licensed CC BY-SA.
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The Gateway Languages Strategy endeavors to equip all people groups with access to the Bible, biblical content, translation training, and translation resources in a language that bilingual people in those groups understand well. Those bilingual people can then translate the Bible and biblical content into a language they understand fully, that is, their own language.
A gateway language (GL) is a language of wider communication into which all our translation tools and resources will be made available. Bilingual speakers use gateway language resources to help them translate the Bible into their own heart language.
Many gateway languages are national languages, languages of education, or trade languages within a country. Just as countries vary in their number of national or recognized languages, many will have more than one gateway language. India, for example, has several gateway languages, while Mozambique has only one. In addition, some gateway languages are used in multiple countries or even on multiple continents. For example, Portuguese is a gateway language from which bilingual speakers in Brazil and in several countries in Africa can translate the Bible into their heart language.
The Gateway Languages Strategy prioritizes developing content and making it available in these diverse languages of the world. This provides tools to empower minority language communities to translate scripture themselves.
Wycliffe Associates has a website with pages that provide information about Bible translation processes, along with Bible translation resources, tools, and links to support. The website is called Bible in Every Language and can be found at Bibleineverylanguage.org. It has the following pages.
Connect to tech support with an email to [email protected] for help with your questions.
MAST stands for Moblizied Assistance Supporting Translation. This methodology was developed by a team of Bible scholars, teachers, educators and other believers to accelerate translation and promote local church ownership of translation projects. MAST emphasizes the necessity of mother tongue speakers as primary translators for a project, and provides for the training of those speakers in an eight-step translation process. The first four steps result in a draft of a passage of Scripture. The final four steps are checking steps to improve the quality of the draft. Teams of translators work together in parallel to draft and check first their own work and then each other's work. They also work in small groups to check keywords and content. Throughout the final four steps, translators are encouraged to use Bible translation tools and resources to affirm and improve their translations. (To learn more about the eight steps of the MAST process, see Discovering and Retelling the Meaning.)
MAST has greatly accelerated Bible translation around the world as hundreds of language communities have successfully leveraged this methodology to produce their own translations of Scripture. Its dependance on teamwork and local ownership are key factors in its success. The tools for translating and checking Scripture support the MAST process by promoting accelerated, accurate, and church-owned translations of the Bible.
Next we recommend you learn about Translation Theory and Practice.