A vision fulfilled

I was 16 in 1985 and freshly challenged in my faith by Cristy, whose locker was beside mine at Chattanooga Christian High School: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” She quoted Matthew 6:21 as a gentle but needed rebuke, refocusing me on “things above.” The Lord used it to jolt me into soul-searching.

My boyhood imagination had bent toward aviation, fueled by encounters with cool missionaries at church. But in the months following Cristy’s admonition, I decided I would join the ranks of Bible translators, in part because my English teacher modeled a love for language and literature. I had spent an amazing summer in Nigeria, helping my archaeologist uncle, and I prayed the Lord would bring me back one day to Africa.

First came college, a stint in the Federal Aviation Administration, study in France, and a research and writing job in London, where I met my Brazilian wife. She had some training in linguistics and shared my pioneering spirit. After a year of marriage, we joined a British Bible translation organization in 1997 and headed to Nairobi, Kenya, to earn our master’s degrees in linguistics. As Westerners, we would be part of an innovation in Bible translation: getting trained in Africa, learning with Africans as peers.

This new program sprang from a bold strategy shift percolating in the Bible translation movement: Vision 2025—a goalpost year for at least starting work in all languages worldwide still without Scripture.

When we graduated in 1999, that number stood around 5,000.

A fever to begin new projects launched the translation movement into an era of rethinking everything so as to get the task done quicker. Agencies across the globe bought into comprehensive strategies that emphasized partnership, just-in-time training, innovation in funding streams, and—­boldest of all—passing the baton of responsibility and leadership to the Global South church.

The story of a Bible translation up to this point usually centered on Western missionaries. They would target a new people group, then arrive with plans and expertise to get the job done. In that less-globalized world, the local expression of the church, if there was one, had meager capacity and connections for translation work.

My wife and I latched on to Vision 2025 while in Nairobi. And with a nudge from our leaders, God birthed in our family a more specific vision: to work alongside nationals to do translation and literacy work in Chad.

ACROSS THE BIBLE translation movement, Scripture Engagement became a paramount part of strategy, as Vision 2025 caused a flood of newly available Scripture. Ditching the previous focus on the product of printed texts, translation teams now envisaged from the outset how a community could be transformed by the Scriptures, by “planning for impact” to engage people with God’s Word before and after it got printed.

Stories and studies prove that community ownership, spearheaded through a local language committee, is key to success. In this vein, leaders also considered new modes of translation. Certain people groups and their language committees preferred an Oral Bible Translation, not print. And the hundreds of sign languages used around the world became visible on the radar screen.

Another tectonic shift came from fleshing out Vision 2025: attitudes about people. Bible agencies began to view locals no longer as “co-translators” but mentored and trained them to lead translation projects. The heart of the translation movement began to beat with the understanding that “God desires not only to reach the nations but also to include the nations in the work,” as Daniel Watters, son of Wycliffe missionaries wrote this year. Its aim became “the transformation that sees indigenous churches transition from recipients to agents of God’s word.”

Real hurdles loomed even so. Developing countries’ nationals had little access to specialized linguistics or theological training and sometimes scant education at all. Hard-won fruit came as Bible agencies tailored academic programs—teaching in languages besides English—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

“More than almost any other human activity, it is the translation of the Bible that has fueled Christian mission and resulted in the expansion of the Church,” wrote R.J. Sim, a Scottish Bible translator in Ethiopia and longtime professor in Kenya. In the Vision 2025 vanguard, Sim, who died only this year, founded the Nairobi graduate program to train African Bible translators—where he also trained us.

In 2002, three years after we graduated, my wife and I joined a translation team. Its Chadian and expatriate members had already broken ground, and we worked another 15 years before finishing the draft of the whole Bible under the auspices of the Chadian Bible Society. Milestones came even before then: literacy work and primers, the New Testament, the audio recording, and many short reading books. It felt at times like too many cooks stirring the pot, and we “got up each other’s nose,” as a British colleague would say. But the very words we translated also transformed us.

One Chadian teammate, who initially worked only in literacy, made a profession of faith when God’s Word in the Psalms penetrated his heart. He buzzed with new motivation and became the key to making the translation sound beautiful and natural—with chette (“pepper”)—as he would say. He and a Chadian female colleague grew in their translation skills and learned Hebrew, becoming more responsible for the text’s accuracy. Their wording made the translation “acceptable” to readers, without obscuring the truth that inevitably causes offence to those without ears to hear. They also began to treat each other differently, in Christ, in a culture where men and women rarely stayed in the same room together.

Being translators’ kids became a tool of God’s transformation for our five children, too. They grew up with Vision 2025 through the highs and lows of cross-cultural life. And they understood intimately our family’s calling as we marveled constantly that we had a hand in bringing God’s Word into another language.

UNREACHED PEOPLE who hear the gospel continue asking the same question posed to missionaries over the centuries: “Why did it take so long for us to hear this good news?”

Translating the news always takes time. But new technology enables teams to work faster, with better accuracy, pushing the movement to new frontiers like Oral Bible Translation and Sign Language Translation. These require specialized audio and video technologies to even make them possible. And print projects depend heavily on Zoom meetings and Paratext software tools as consultants work with a team to “check” their work, leveraging the internet for a faster pace or more regular interaction.

Last century, sorting data on note cards in shoeboxes gave way to computers, causing an explosion in productivity and pacing. This century, artificial intelligence (AI) is the new game changer. About 500 languages are now using AI for drafting translation.

Before you start worrying that robots are churning out Scripture, consider that AI tools, like Scripture Forge, do some tasks flawlessly and more easily than a translation team. It reduces open quotes, missing or misnumbered verses, or unintended additions in a text. Languages with a New Testament can even use that corpus to produce a machine draft of Old Testament books for humans to glean from and improve their own translation: One Nigerian team I serve as a consultant found that Scripture Forge renderings in Deuteronomy sparked them to express their own wording better. And like a good German, AI gets grammar rules right every time, remembering to use an inclusive pronoun where the team forgot. AI tools still require trained people to ensure exegetical faithfulness.

GOD’S PROVISION through prayer changes everything—as throughout all 2,000-plus years of the Bible translation movement. Vision 2025 has now been achieved in many countries around the world. Soon, “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14 NIV).

In August, the official tally from Vision 2025’s (current) alliance of over 100 partner Bible agencies shows only 544 of the world’s 7,396 living languages still need translation work to begin! About 300 of these are sign languages. Many of those that remain will have an Oral Bible Translation. Major Scripture organizations remain committed to making “God’s Word accessible to all people by 2033.”

“Latest statistics suggest there is some form of translation or Scripture Engagement work going on in 4,457 languages,” British linguist Peter Brassington shared recently in a consultant forum.

My own Bible agency’s vision is galvanizing me afresh: ASAP—All Scripture, All People. This year some of us started learning American Sign Language, in hopes of branching out to one day serve deaf translation teams.

—Rob Holmes works as a consultant for Seed Company, serving Bible translation teams in Africa. He is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute.