We started hearing about CCBT a few years ago, but it bubbled up again this past week in a very big way. A foundation made it clear that they would prefer working with onsite team members who were capable and experienced in CCBT. Can you help us find a few case studies — and just help us understand it better please? It seems like a game-changer, but it also seems to be somewhat debated by those who prefer a more traditional Bible translation approach.
For starters, we could browse to…
But it feels like there should be much, much more.
We have worked with Wycliffe Bible Translators since the early 1980’s. The Bible translation projects with which we are involved have always been “community based” and “community owned” The translators are all mother tongue speakers of the languages. Only in monolingual or near monolingual environments, or in communities in which there are NO Christian adherents would any current-generation Bible translation project not be a community-owned programme, and then only in the earlier stages.
Hello, I was made aware of this post on our Team43 Slack channel, many of the folks there are engaged in CCBT to one degree or another (you can sign up at https://door43.org/en/contact/ if you’re interested).
CCBT (as used on http://www.ccbt.bible) refers to “Church-Centric Bible Translation” which is an approach that equips the church that speaks any given language for excellence in Bible translation, as an intrinsic part of their theological formation and leadership development. There are some similarities with other approaches, but in many ways, this Bible translation model is very different.
At unfoldingWord, we’ve made an attempt to describe it in some detail in the paper “From Unreached to Established” (https://unfoldingword.org/established). Other papers that may be helpful include “Trustworthy and Trusted” (which considers how to equip the church to achieve excellence in Bible translation, https://unfoldingword.org/trustworthy) and “The Gateway Languages Strategy” (which describes a global strategy for providing content, tools and training that equip the entire global church, https://unfoldingword.org/gateway).
Also there is a Getting Started guide that we put together at https://unfoldingword.bible/ccbt-getting-started/. Hopefully that has some value for you too.
Thanks Jesse. Very helpful!