I have been reflecting a bit in the past few months on Open Source Scholarship. Now, it may be a question of whether I actually mean Open Source Scholarship or Open Scholarship (a question Stephen Carlson has raised at Hypotyposeis), but I will ignore save that question for another day.
As most readers know, my contribution to Open Source Scholarship is the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary. But there are some other projects as well that I wanted to mention. One, that I just came across today, is the project on Open Source Religious Resources. Another, which I somehow missed in the blogosphere, is a fascinating post on open source Bible translation by David Ker at Lingamish. Ker is a translator who lives in Africa, so his need for translation is much more acute than those of us in English speaking societies.
One of the points the he brings up is how infrequently the people who will use a translation have input into its production. The RSV, NRSV, NIV, etc. all bring out their translations after scholars have considered all the issues they think relevant. While they (we) are, of course, the ones who know the issues and can do translation, it seems that there is a step missing. After all, every programmer will release a beta of the software she is developing so that those who will use the program will help in finding bugs. But we never do that with our translations. How would our translations look differently if we took a year to release a beta of a new version and then correct or modify the version based on the feedback.
Obviously in such a process, we must deal critically with the critiques. If we have set out to produce a gender-inclusive translation, for instance, it doesn’t matter of people complain that they don’t like gender-inclusive translations. That is a philosophical difference. But if particular terms do not communicate well or the phrasing of a verse does not read well, that would be something to take into account. It would also be a place for other scholars to comment as well.
Obviously, this creates more work for the translators, but it seems to me that it would be well worth the additional efford.
On November 13th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Thanks for the plug. Check out http://www.bigbible.org/blog/. Tim and crew are doing some cool stuff in this area.
On November 13th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I think that one of the things someone would find if they did that is that there may be lots of _uses_ of the Bible that the translators didn’t think to plan for. For example, my wife likes the NIV because it is the easiest to memorize. If I were a translator, I probably would never have thought of memorizability as a concern within the text.
On November 14th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
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