Paul O’Rear is Associate International Translation Coordinator overseeing the development of translation resources within SIL, including Translator’s Notes (TN), Exegetical Summaries (ES), Semantic and Structure Analyses (SSA) as well as the translation resource products, Translator’s Workplace (TW) and its French subset Bureau du Traducteur (BdT). Paul has experience with a translation project in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea (Wára) and was responsible for the development of the original language tools (Greek and Hebrew) in the initial releases of TW and BART. In between times, Paul worked at Microsoft Corporation for several years supporting content development, design and distribution for Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Office products.
Translation Resources of the Future
Abstract
Translation Resources of the Future is concerned with developing new ways of creating translation resources with more immediate accessibility, broader non-Western contribution, and more open access.
Translators working on New Testament (NT) translations have leveraged SIL’s Translator’s Notes series predominantly. We consistently hear that they are our most valued translation resources. We have very few volumes for Old Testament (OT) books available, while OT translation has grown steadily.
TNs are very labor, experience and expertise intensive to produce. We need new avenues to:
• provide translation guidance for OT translators ASAP
• enable the development of OT TN volumes that live up to the same quality as the NT volumes
• accelerate the development of translation resources more broadly
• develop a process that has the additional benefit of generating other new resources and tools as a by-product
These concerns should also be combined with the following objectives:
• accelerating the release of existing TN preliminary versions (e.g. not yet published, but close to publishable quality)
• developing an open authoring/developing/reviewing environment for TNs and other translation resources
• fostering a predominantly open community for translation resource and tool development
This paper will discuss current initiatives addressing these concerns, possible new tools and resources, and an opportunity for engagement with the broader Bible translation community.