Jim Stahl joined Wycliffe in 1982. Before marrying Janet in 1988, Jim worked in three Asian countries carrying out sociolinguistic research. Jim and Janet served in Vanuatu from 1991-2006 facilitating literacy, sociolinguistic, and translation training efforts. Since 2007, Janet and Jim have developed an oral Bible storytelling approach for Bible-less language communities, while working at Seed Company.
Bible Storytelling for Multilingual Societies
Abstract
Bible storytelling is a live performance and communication event, an iterative relationship between the story, storyteller, and audience. The story itself is molded by the language repertoire of the storyteller and audience. The audience gives immediate feedback to the storyteller about the story.
Multiple language varieties / dialects can be accommodated by the storytelling team in a Bible storytelling project. While such projects benefit from sociolinguistic research, they do not necessarily need to start at the same place as would a traditional Bible translation project. In the course of a Bible storytelling project, the language community helps storytellers and staff deal with sociolinguistic questions, such as, language variety choice, hidden languages, diglossia, social networks, and language mixing.
The world is mostly multilingual. What will a multilingual model for development related to Bible translation look like?