Quality in Bible Translation Principles and Procedures

Quality assurance criteria, standards and processes vary widely between Bible translation organisations. And new personnel, methods, technologies, urgencies and funding models are demanding new characterisations and prioritisations of quality. The object of quality assurance may be personnel, process, product or a range of other features of a project. But the agent, for most of the last century’s Bible translation boom, has usually been an elite cadre of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, increasingly working through digital tools, with little community review and testing.

If our profession is to do justice and live its product, it needs to equally accommodate the translation expectations and quality criteria of other times, places, cultures and media. And Bible translation organisations will need to engage with projects in ways that foster people’s own importation of the Bible into their worlds, according to their own quality criteria, and using their own metalanguage, their community and religious idiom, and their own multilingual paradigms for literature and orature.

Parameters of loyalty to the source text, engagement in translation processes and some form and degree of equivalence can still be affirmed, perhaps even all the more strongly, as they are worked out contextually in the service of the churches and others. But some process and product norms may need to be called into question.

A Christian understanding of the Bible’s place in our faith demands its translation and retranslation in each time, place and culture. The churches need instrumental translations which can be retranslated into people’s lives, and which die out in the process lest they themselves become idols.