Improve Naturalness & Clarity through Audio Recording EARLY, before Community and Consultant Checks

Problem: After very carefully following the 10 Steps of Bible translation, we sent “clear, accurate, natural” text to the printer, and then began recording the audio version of the text. The recording process itself uncovered errors in naturalness and clarity that somehow slipped past all the other checks. But it was too late to make revisions! If we had done audio recording much earlier, the result would have been a translation of higher quality. We propose doing a draft audio recording of translated text BEFORE village checking and consultant checking.
Based on personal experience, this paper will outline a simple process to do an initial audio recording of written text using HearThis in conjunction with Paratext. This recording is then checked by another team member for accuracy, clarity and naturalness. Where errors in audio accuracy occur, we do further inquiry with the reader to see if the errors are due to faulty decoding, not knowing a particular word or expression, or an unnatural rendering. Any questionable text can be passed to the translation team to be considered for possible revision.
This “draft” audio recording can be done with adequate audio quality in village situations with a laptop/tablet and simple headset, and even on smartphones. High quality recording of the final text will be done at a later stage in the project.
If the text is revised, the draft audio can also be easily revised and then used in village comprehension checks and is especially beneficial for community checking when reading fluency is low. It can also be used in early distributions of smaller portions of scripture on audio players or phones, and/or through Scripture App Builder.