Introduction to the Open English Translation

I've been thinking for a loooong time about starting a new English Bible translation (unashamedly inspired by the public domain World English Bible (WEB) of Michael Paul Johnson and team). After much searching and pondering, I've come up with the name: Open English Translation (OET) of the Bible.

Open (unashamedly inspired by Open Source software) expresses my desire to make it freely available for others to use or adapt in any way. I haven't decided on a licence yet, so feel free to make suggestions. I'm also wanting to make it open in the sense of open for others to join in and help with (but that doesn't mean that it would be open to everyone -- just those who show a genuine interest and ability). As mentioned in prior blogs, there's a number of others way ahead of me in developing the necessary (web) software tools for that kind of project.

English because it'll be an English translation. (It seems a little ethnocentric to me to leave the language qualifier out of the title, although it is true that in most cases that language of the title itself indicates the language of the translation.)

Translation just to remind readers/users that it is indeed just a translation of the original Scriptures. (Again it seems a little deficient to me if a book called something like The Holy Bible doesn't clearly remind its readers that it's not the original.)

I'll try to progressively blog about various aspects of the OET over the next few weeks.

Introduction

I am a linguist / Bible translator who is just helping a team finish a Scripture selection (New Testament plus 8% of the Old Testament) ready for publication for a cultural community in Asia. It's taken us over twenty years to do this, including learning the language (plus a couple of the major languages in the country), establishing a literacy program, training local (mother-tongue) translators, establishing a Scripture promotion program, etc., etc.

Now I'm starting this new blog to pursue an interest in making more Biblical materials more available to students of the Scriptures all over the world. I'm concerned that it often seems that the Western countries are the "gate-keepers" of the original (Hebrew and Greek) texts, as well as the reputable English translations that local translators often want to use as resources for study and for translating into their own languages. Often copyrights or expensive charges prevent students from the rest of the world from having legal access to these helpful materials.

I think there's a growing (but still very small) number of people who recognize this problem and who, rather than focussing on the negative aspects of this discussion, want to take positive action to make quality Bible resource materials more freely available.

Hopefully you'll join me in thinking through some of these issues over the next weeks and months, and coming up with an action plan or how we (yes, me and YOU) can make a useful contribution. I guess the steps might be: 1/ try to define the problem more clearly, 2/ identify what Bible study resources are currently freely available, 3/identify what resources still need to be made available, 4/ plan how this might be achieved (this involves both data resources and software resources), 5/ see which part of this picture we might be able to contribute something tangible to. Please do contribute your comments, suggestions, objections, and anything else that will spur on this area of research.