Now that we’ve learned more about internalization from Katie Frost, it’s time to talk about a new tool that recently came out for actually doing oral Bible translation projects. It’s called Audio Project Manager, and it’s a free program that anyone can download and start working with right away. Nathan Payne is going to walk us through what the software does and how it can be leveraged for oral projects. 

I’ve worked with Render for a while now and it still has a lot of drawbacks. One of the biggest ones is that it’s not freely available, and you have to jump through a ton of hoops to get access to it. The interface has a lot of annoying quirks, especially for consultants, and it has very little flexibility. This is where Audio Project Manager comes in to give people a better option with much more flexibility and freedom.

Nathan Payne who is going to help us understand the software, was born in Peru to missionary Bible translators who worked in the jungle with the Asheninka people. He met his wife, Katy, in high school, and attended Texas A&M university where he studied chemical engineering. He and his wife later studied linguistics after feeling called to Bible translation. After some fieldwork, he moved into a training and consulting role for storying projects. A few years later he became the SIL Americas Area Storying and Orality Coordinator. And in 2020 became the SIL Oral Translation Services coordinator, giving direction to the organization’s involvement in Storying, OBT and other oral strategies. He currently serves as director of the Oral English Bible Translation (Spoken English Bible) and Oral Exegetical Tools project.

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As Oral Bible Translation continues to grow in popularity and influence, it’s helpful to keep learning more about its core component: internalization. So I’ve asked one of the few experts in the world on this subject to join me and walk us through what internalization is, how it works, and more. Her name is Katie Frost, and she was actually my teacher a long time ago for a workshop on oral drafting that I attended in Dallas. Katie is an Ethnoarts consultant with SIL, and a professor at Dallas International University. Her experience in both ethnoarts and linguistics/translation led to co-founding the Psalms: Layer by Layer project as part of pursuing how these disciplines intersect in biblical Hebrew poetry. She’s done fieldwork in the Netherlands and the Middle East, and is married to Josh who also serves in Bible translation. And they have a baby girl.

See Katie’s presentations and handouts on Non-Narrative Internalization and Preparing for and Facilitating Internalization.

Kris Toler's thesis on internalization can be downloaded here.

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Links:

The Archive: https://brandfolder.com/portals/thearchive

https://tools.bible/

https://bibletranslationcompetencies.org/

https://www.sebts.edu/news-and-events/headlines/2022/12/announcing-the-new-caskey-center-for-biblical-text-and-translation/

Journal of Translation

KTOT: https://paratext.org/download/download-paratext-extras/

Psalm 136 in Hebrew: https://youtu.be/C8ZIJ2fmnMw

More news at MAP.

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No English translation of the Bible has had more influence on the world than the King James Version. But have you read its preface? A lot of people haven’t because for years it has usually been left out of printings of the KJV. Our guest in this episode, Josh Barzon, wants to make sure more people listen to what these legendary translators had to say, so he’s written a book called The Forgotten Preface which aims to shed more light on this overlooked historical document. What did these men actually believe about inspiration, preservation, and translation?

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We continue and conclude the interview with Jon, the creator of copy.church. 

Before we get into the rest of the interview I want to make a few comments. As I have more conversations with people around the world about the issue of freely giving gospel ministry and the stance that I hold that ministry should be supported, not sold, I’ve run into a few common threads. The first is that people–even world-class intelligent scholars, have no biblical arguments for disagreeing with me. Everyone has pragmatic or emotional arguments, but so far no one has any biblical arguments. And this, I suspect, is perhaps because there are none. We’re letting our thinking about selling ministry be driven by the world rather than Scripture.

Second, when people hear me talk about these things, many seem unable to listen to what I’m saying. They assume that what I’m saying is that all people who engage in ministry should never receive money and should be dying of poverty. So let me say again: I believe gospel ministry should be supported, not sold. It’s a very simple distinction that for some reason people often refuse to hear, and then assume something totally irrelevant to the discussion.

Third, I’d like to suggest that it’s not a very serious argument to simply dismiss the example of Jesus and Paul as irrelevant and non-prescriptive to the believers today. This is another thing I’ve run into. If you want to say that Jesus’ command to freely give in Matthew 10 has zero implications for present day ministry, you have to give some serious reasons for why that’s a serious hermeneutic. And if you are still convinced that Jesus and Paul’s examples have no bearing on your life and the church today, I’d encourage you to at least figure out where in Scripture we find guardrails for money and ministry. If there are no guardrails in the Bible regarding these things, then we have no answer to the prosperity preachers. It’s important to be able to show why it’s unbiblical to sell prayers for people or charge money for admission to a church worship service. Obviously there are no direct commands in Scripture regarding these things, so you would have to base these convictions off biblical principles. I would strongly suggest that it would be pretty sad and disgraceful if we as the Church end up with no way to scripturally condemn the selling of prayers or the selling of baptism, for example. If we can’t condemn such basic abuses, then we are not actually paying attention to the very fabric and spirit of God’s Word. Yet this is precisely where everyone I have talked to so far who disagrees with a biblical prohibition of selling ministry ends up. That is, they are unable to tell me from Scripture why it’s not ok to charge someone money for a baptism.

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We’ve talked about copyright on this podcast already, but we still haven’t taken a meticulous look at the way mainstream Bible translations are licensed, what the specific limitations are, and how different translations compare to each other in this area. This episode will be a real eye-opener for many of you, so make sure you’re sitting down. We’re going to be talking to the creator of a website called copy.church, which seeks to point people to the simple truth that it’s wrong to limit access to the Word of God. He’s been thinking about and studying these things for years, and I think what he has to say is extremely important. 

Jon is the founder of Gracious Tech, a mission-focused app development ministry. He first got interested in missions while travelling in South-East Asia and realizing the dire need for the gospel there. He promptly committed his life to mission work and completed an MDiv in preparation. While he initially thought he'd be putting his IT skills to the side, he soon realized how advantageous it would be to have apps for sharing the Gospel and aiding mission work.

During his first term of mission overseas, he worked on an app for sharing Bible stories using plain Scripture. It was almost finished when he realized the licenses of almost all Bible translations don't permit sharing plain scripture, and instead must be accompanied by other commentary. Not knowing much about copyright or how to go about seeking permission, the project was put on hold for many years.

Jon later founded Gracious Tech and now commits most of his time to developing apps for mission. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and two young daughters.

Please consider helping spread Jon's website copy.church.

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Many people ask me what they might need to become a BT consultant. In this podcast we'll walk through all the details of what you'll be need to measure up to if you want to serve the BT movement in this way. Here's a public listing of these competencies: https://bibletranslationcompetencies.org/consultant-competencies/

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What does a sociolinguistics consultant do, and how can Bible translators continue to think carefully about language vitality? What kinds of questions should you ask to quickly assess the status of a language? For answers to all this and more, we have Scott Smith as our guest today. Get ready for a deep dive into the world of sociolinguistics.

Scott Smith and I met back in 2011 when he convinced me to join him and his team over in Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa. He and his wife Margaret have been working there on and off for decades, and they are some of the most generous people I know. Fun fact: they built their home out of shipping containers right on the beach in Equatorial Guinea, and I’ve spent a lot of time out there visiting with them over the years, drinking coconuts and enjoying the warm ocean water. Sometimes Scott and I would have meetings while floating on the waves. Scott is also known for his jokes, playing with words in multiple languages, and for enjoying being a polyglot in general. 

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My grandparents ended up having four children, all of whom eventually worked in Bible translation. Their family loved to laugh and sing and tell jokes. This is the second part of their lives in BT, in which we reach the completion of the NT in Zapotec of Sierra Juarez (language code zaa). "God has helped us to translate portions of the Old Testament and the complete New Testament. We have done a literacy program, with primers, a dictionary, grammar and reading books. We have trained and discipled many Zapotecs, done medical work, taught music, helped choirs and programs, participated in community projects, sent Zapotecs to schools of higher education, done group service and public relations, and hospitality, counseling, discipleship and a few other things. We even had a part in beginning a radio program in Zapotec. Now there are many trained Pastors and leaders, churches and Christian workers." 

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My grandma and grandpa Neil and Jane Nellis are no longer with us, but they did leave behind a 60,000 word book that records their story in their own words—their family histories, their conversions, their love story, and the account of their work in Mexico and Bible translation. This is the first part of an abridged version of their story. They lived through the Great Depression, played chess with Uncle Cam, and eventually ended up translating the NT into the language of the most famous president of Mexico.

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