Linguists: The Next Bottleneck?

About ten years ago, the BT movement was caught off guard by the consultant shortage. We are about to face another shortage, this time of linguists. Linguistics is an essential component of BT activities in minority language communities, and SIL cooperative training programs have played an important role in preparing workers for this task. Since 2000, however, the number of training programs in the USA and Canada has halved from six to just three, and the number of students from these remaining schools has dropped. Similarly, last year Wycliffe USA took on just 52 new members, and only 8 joined Wycliffe Canada. As Stephen Coertze, executive director of the Wycliffe Global Alliance, notes, some Alliance organizations “are not seeing themselves as resource organisations anymore, but more as influencers of the church to get involved in mission or Bible translation... This raises the question: Is there still space for foreigners to move to another country and serve in mission, especially in Bible translation? My response is yes, but we need to have a discussion around this.”

This paper is intended to contribute to this discussion. We will evaluate the extent to which the decline in trained linguistic workers from “western” countries is being offset by an increase in the development of linguists through SIL cooperative training programs in the majority world. We will also look at the types of roles for which “foreigners” may be well suited, and the ways in which linguistics training must adapt in light of the growing impact of oral translation strategies and computer-assisted Bible translation. We hope that by engaging in this discussion, we will not be caught off guard again.