Group Consultation: Engaging Primary Language Speakers at All Levels in Quality Assurance

The shortage of consultants is critical in most Bible Agencies and a bottleneck exists in consultation. Group consultation has been developed as a way of economizing as much as possible on time and effort in Bible translation and as part of the ongoing quest to think innovatively about how to improve speed and quality in Bible translation. This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of this method and also has tracked the history of outcomes since 2007 from training of translators to publication. The group checking method has been used in most countries where The Word for the world has been working and has become common practice in Asia, Africa and Europe. Some specific examples are quoted in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Asia. It has been found that group consultation has helped to enhance quality, create greater involvement of nationals at all levels of quality assurance, and to speed up Bible translation. It facilitates and assists greatly in the training of translators, exegetes and consultants-in-training and this paper will show results in this regard. Group consultation enables the training of primary and regional language speakers to be more involved in quality assurance in Bible translation. Group consultation can also be used in the oral to print approach, where a first draft of a scripture portion is produced orally, recorded, community checked, approved, and only then written down. It is the belief of the author that group checking procedures will work well in checking these transcribed texts, and ensuring that scriptures are accurate. Back translations could be produced by using the interlinear tool in Paratext and checked by using group consultation.