OET Study Version

The Study Version (OET-SV) is the third version of the Open English Translation of the Bible (OET). Again, the text is quite different from the previously announced two versions, and the main distinctives are:

• It's aimed at preachers / students who want to study the text carefully in English
• It will attempt to give a readable English text with normal contemporary English punctuation
• Additions to the text which are necessary to translate the meaning will be marked
• The divine name (tetragrammaton) will be rendered as Yahweh
• People and place names will be transliterated more accurately, e.g., Yonah instead of Jonah, Yesous instead of Jesus, but the traditional spelling will be added in parenthesis where the name is first used in any book
• The word God will be capitalised where appropriate, but other references, e.g., the father, the son, will not be capitalised
• Paragraph breaks and section headings will be added to the text, along with indentations for poetry and quotations and a method of explicitly marking Hebrew parallelism
• Modern measurements will be used in the text but the original measurements will also be noted
• There will extensive cross-referencing and footnotes, including notes on the more important variants in the ancient manuscripts
• It is hoped that the web-based publication will also provide live links to the OET-LV.

This is intended to be a version that you would be confident to preach or teach from and to recommend to your Bible students. Again, the final (more detailed) specifications and a small sample text should eventually be available here.

Ok, now, surely there can't be (m)any more OET versions? The next blog will tell...

OET Readers' Version

Today I am revealing the initial design plans for the second version of the Open English Translation (OET), the Readers' Version. This is pretty-much totally different from the Literal Version. Here are some of the main features of the OET-RV:

• It will attempt to give an easily-readable, natural English text with normal contemporary English punctuation
• It will attempt to replace Christian jargon with language that is more likely to be found in modern newspapers, magazines, and books
• Additions to the text which are necessary to translate the meaning will not be marked in any special way
• The divine name will be rendered as Yahweh
• Traditional English spellings will be used for people and place names
• The word God will be capitalised where appropriate, but other references, e.g., the father, the son, will not be capitalised
• Paragraph breaks will be added to the text, along with indentations for poetry and quotations
• Section headings will be added but typeset/displayed in such a way so as not to interrupt the flow of the actual Scripture text
• Traditional chapter and verse numbers will be downplayed, as in all OET versions
• Only modern measurements will be used (the original measurements will not be included)
• There will be a minimum of footnotes
• The OET-RV is aimed at readers (including second-language English readers) who want to easily read the text and understand the overall message
• It is hoped that the web-based publication will also provide live links to the OET-LV.

The final specifications and a small sample text should eventually be available here.

So hopefully you can already guess where I'm going with the OET. So far I've announced the Literal Version and the Readers' version -- quite different versions which are complementary parts of the OET translation. It is intended that they be viewable together, especially on media where they can scroll and be linked together. One is easy to read; the other choppy and unnatural but helping the Bible student to understand where the smooth English of the Readers' Version has come from.

There's a big debate these days about the most useful kind of English Bible translation. Different publishers try to position their translations at different spots in the market. The OET tries to solve the dilemma with a different approach: multiple linked versions all under the banner of the Open English Translation.

And best of it, it's planned that all of this be made available under a very generous free licence (details not decided yet) to enable and encourage others to use and build upon this work.

Beaten again

I just can't believe this -- everyone is stealing my ideas! Actually, I'm happy, because I'm finding so many other people already thinking in similar ways to me. Knowing that great minds think alike, I figure that... well, I'll leave it to you to figure!

Yesterday, I included a link to John Dyer's writeup about chapters and verses.  A couple of his links pointed to The Books of the Bible project by the International Bible Society (IBS) which I just read about today. Apparently IBS assembled a group in 2003 to explore a new visual presentation of the Bible. They used Today's New International Version (TNIV) as their text.

According to the FAQ list, they relegated chapter and verse numbers to a range down at the bottom of the printed page. Even more amazingly, they dared to change the order of the books, changed the traditional Old Testament to First Testament, and got rid of most (or all?) section headings.

These were all things that I had planned for the Open English Translation of the Bible (OET):

• greatly downplay chapter and verse numbers,
• downplay section headings (by not allowing them to actually interrupt the text),
• change the Old Testament, New Testament terminology, and
• change the order (and by combining, even the number) of books.

(I also plan a number of other distinctives for the OET, but I'll resist the urge to list them all here so as not to clutter this blog.)

So yes, it was very encouraging for me to see that an organisation like IBS has already experimented with these issues. Maybe some of my ideas aren't so far off the wall after all!

I'm sure that tradition has kept the sales of something this different pretty small, but I'll certainly have to order a copy. There's sample PDFs for download here. I think I might just print one or two and see how they look.

P.S. Here's a link to another excellent little write-up that John also referred to.

More on chapters and verses

Last week when I started writing about my design of the Open English Translation (OET), I alluded to the fact that chapter and verse numbers would be downplayed in all OET versions.

I planned to write more about this later in the month (and still hope to), but today I came across another blog with a similar theme here. So again, it's encouraging to see that some others are seeing some of the same drawbacks to making this reference system so prominent in our Bibles. (Of course, there are many positive features also.)

So just another quick prelude to my forthcoming writeup: The OET will include book, chapter and verse references so that it can be used by traditional software and webware and people looking for specific passages, but the printed or displayed versions will go to a lot of effort to downplay all those distracting numbers.

By the way, the same goes for section headings, but more on that another time...

OET Literal Version

Most Bible translations consist of only one version, but a number of editions, perhaps with British vs. American spellings, with or without cross-references or study notes, mini-concordance, etc. However, the Open English Translation (OET) of the Bible comes from the beginning with more than one version with different aims, but expected to be used together just like a modern builder might use a nail-gun for many tasks, but pick up his hammer for others.

The first OET version I want to introduce is the Literal Version (OET-LV). Here's an initial list of some of the Literal Version features:

• It will attempt to follow the original (Hebrew and Greek) Scriptures as closely as possible (at the expense of sounding "wooden" in English)
• This means being as literal as possible -- trying to match pretty much word-for-word (thus idioms won't be adjusted)
• Any non-trivial words that must be added to the English for understanding will be clearly marked as additions
• Every attempt will be made to make the English glosses consistent (at least for the primary meanings of words)
• Primary and extended meanings of words will be marked using slashes, e.g., (מַלְאָךְ) messenger/angel
• Slashes may also be used to denote an English range of meaning that's perhaps different from the word in the original languages, e.g., sorrow/mourning
• Underscores may be used to join English words coming from a single source language word, e.g., cause_to_stumble, except that small grammatical features like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions maybe be exempted from this
• Where it seems to critically affect the meaning, grammatical features that are not normally in English (such as marking gender or distinguishing between you singular and plural) will be marked
• The divine name will simply be rendered as YHWH
• People and place names will be transliterated more accurately, e.g., Yonah instead of Jonah, Yesous instead of Jesus (but not going to the trouble of using additional markings to distinguish the long and short vowels, etc.)
• Only proper nouns (and sentence beginnings) will be capitalised in the text, thus there will be no God only god
• The translation will be rendered into English sentence by sentence (with ambiguities marked in footnotes), i.e., the 19th sentence of the English New Testament should match the 19th sentence of the Greek.
• There will be no section headers or paragraph markings -- it will generally be displayed by sentence (as traditional chapter and verse numbers will be downplayed in all OET versions)
• Only original measurements will be used, e.g., cubits not metres.
• There will be extensive footnotes about variants (and missing or unclear sections) in the early manuscripts
• The  OET-LV is aimed at readers and students who don't read the original languages themselves, but want to get a good idea of what they actually say
• It is hoped that the web-based publication can also provide live links to facsimiles of the original documents.

A very rough sample of a small book can be seen here: Jonah

Please note your suggested improvements in the comments -- I want to hear your ideas for improvements.

So hopefully you can see that the OET-LV is aimed to give pastors and all those studying the English Bible relatively good access to the original texts, even if they are impeded by not being able to read the original languages.

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.

A sad scenario

I second the story at Distant Shores Media. We hit the same problem with our experience in Asia -- the local church leaders and others wanted to take popular Christian resources and adapt them for their use. In the situation that we were in, it was often more to do with Christian songs and music rather than the Bible because the Scriptures were still in the process of being translated and checked.

The pastors' cooperative organisation didn't have the resources to seek (or pay for) the international permissions to use and translate or adapt these materials. So either they don't use them at all, or else they may feel pressured to go ahead and use them without the permissions. Either scenario sadly limits the ministry of the indigenous churches.

Thumbs up to the slowly increasing number of people and ministries who are forgoing the urge to control and profit from their productions (often already paid for by offerings, donations, or other funds) and who are making their materials available for the rapidly growing church in the third world to make full use of. I'm hoping one day to be able to highlight them at Freely-Given.org.