Peer Review and Quality Assurance: A Case for Programmatic Accreditation

The Bible Translation movement (BTM) has expanded greatly over the last quarter century with its focus on starting a translation for every remaining need (aka, Vision2025). Perhaps the most significant outcome of this period has been a massive acceleration of partnerships among translation agencies, national churches, and local communities.

This quantitative benefit has created a wide variety of training programs for the BTM, for example, the Wycliffe Global Alliance has more than 100 “diverse organizations and networks." While standards and competencies have been established for translation quality assurance, training and educational programs lack a mechanism for ensuring continual improvement for the BTM, namely, programmatic accreditation.

Programmatic accreditation is common for academic disciplines (e.g., engineering, health sciences, business administration), particularly those that lead to certification. Bible Translation has proven to be a rigorous and sustainable discipline with applications both in Scripture as well as Scripture-Based initiatives; it would benefit from having its own program-level accreditation.

In this paper, I provide an overview of BT quality assurance both as a discipline and in training. Looking at recent proposals for collegial review, I compare and contrast the current BT training to existing programmatic-accreditors and show that program-accreditation would improve BT training in several key areas: transferability of credit across programs, academic recognition and professional development for consultants, peer-review assessment for improvement of the BT discipline, and maximal networking among agencies and schools on a global scale.