The Effect of Early Input from Consultants and End Users on the Quality of Oral Bible Translations

The process of Oral Bible Translation enables the translation teams to receive feedback from consultants and the communities within weeks from the start of a project. The consultants give their feedback as soon as a Biblical section is drafted, peer checked, and community tested. Once a section is approved, the audio files are released into the community facilitating early feedback from a wide range of end users. This paper aims at analyzing the effect of this early intervention by the consultant and early feedback from the community on the quality of translation by looking at data from three Oral Bible Translation projects in South Asia. Does this “release early, release often, listen to the users” principle help in producing quality translations relatively early in the project? Does the consultant’s workload reduce considerably over time? What are some of the changes made in the translation style and choice of vocabulary based on user feedback? These are some of the questions this paper attempts to answer with data from active Oral Bible Translation projects.