We’re Changing our Name – but our Mission Remains the Same
TBTA’s board of directors met in May and voted to change our organization’s name to “All the Word.” We wanted a new name that makes it very clear that our mission is to translate the entire Bible into as many languages as possible. We’ll soon have a new website at www.AllTheWord.org, and future newsletters will be sent from that site. Please pray that God will guide us through the many challenges and obstacles that must be overcome. The potential for impacting this world for Jesus Christ through computer assisted Bible translation is enormous.
Our Work in The Philippines
We’re very pleased to have two new methods of distributing our Tagalog translations of Old Testament Bible books and Bible stories. In order to reach more people and also avoid the costs associated with printing, we’re now putting our Tagalog translations with pictures into Android phone apps that can be downloaded for free from Google Play. The app for the book of Ruth is available now, and the apps for Genesis, Esther, and Daniel will be available later this summer. We’re excited that Tagalog speakers all around the world will be able to download these easily understandable books of the Bible to their phones for free. We’ll still continue printing these books for use in schools, orphanages, and other places where people don’t have phones, but we’re hoping that these apps will be our primary method of distributing these translations. In the Philippines there are still many places where the internet is not available, so our second method of distributing these books will be on DVDs that contain videos of a woman reading these books with pictures in the background. A small sample showing the first three verses of Ruth can be seen below. These videos will also be available on Youtube and our website.
New Techniques for Applying Technology to Missions
Jeremiah Chung recently attended a missions conference in Europe. The purpose of the conference was to explore new techniques for applying technology to missions. More than 400 participants representing over 100 mission organizations attended the conference. Each organization was invited to do a one minute presentation describing their mission, and Jeremiah’s presentation won first place. You can see a video of his presentation below.
Our Work in Vanuatu:
Steve Beale has begun working on the Vanuatu project. He will be holding a workshop in 2018 for 5 languages on Tanna island in the southern part of Vanuatu. He has started working via email with two of the languages, and plans to make as much progress as possible with all 5 languages prior to the actual workshop. He is currently building the computational grammars and dictionaries that our software requires during the translation process. His initial focus for the Tanna languages will be to translate the Old Testament stories for which Richard Denton is currently developing semantic representations. After the grammars and dictionaries have been built for these languages, every text for which we have semantic representations will be translated into the Tanna languages. Prayerfully these texts will eventually include all of the Old Testament and New Testament books, theological training materials, Christian classics, literacy materials, and other community development texts. Please pray for the ongoing work, the translators who will be participating, and for funding for Steve’s travel and food/lodging expenses for the conference participants.
Additional Praise and Prayer Requests:
1) Please pray for Richard Denton as he continues developing semantic representations for the Bible stories. He hopes to have all 66 stories completed by the end of this year. The semantic representations of the biblical books and these stories are the foundation of this project, and are crucial for producing accurate translations in a wide variety of languages.
2) Please pray for Stephen Beale as he continues to prepare for a workshop in Vanuatu in 2018. He’s hoping to gather the necessary linguistic data in order to produce initial draft translations of several Old Testament books in five languages spoken on Tanna Island.
3) Jeremiah Chung is thankful that he has recently made many global and local connections with people who want to use technology to make the Bible translation process more efficient. He also successfully completed teaching three courses about Bible translation in Chinese. Please pray for his upcoming trips, consultations, and conferences.
4) Please pray for Tod Allman as he continues to work in both Tagalog and Ayta Mag-Indi. We hope to put the Ayta Mag-Indi translations into the same picture books and Android apps as the Tagalog translations.