When Jesus was born to Mary, God “translated” himself into our human world. This act of God’s translation continues today wherever the gospel is expressed, in each language and lived out in each culture that makes up our diverse world. Unfortunately, the church often ignores its cultural and linguistic diversity and, instead, imposes a dominant “language” and “culture” for expressing faith. This textbook seeks to challenge that situation. By identifying common barriers that prevent people from engaging with Scripture, the authors explore the ways churches can maintain unity in Christ and celebrate the diversity of their membership. Addressing a wide-range of relevant issues and using practical applications, this revised and updated edition re-establishes the importance of good, contextual Scripture engagement. A key resource in helping church leaders encourage people to communicate with God in their own language and to discover that Christ wants to make himself at home in their world.

If you, or other members of your church, regularly feel frustrated because what you read in the Bible is simply irrelevant to your daily life, or you feel as if there is a barrier keeping you from understanding God's word in a way that inspires you to live it out, then this practical, interactive textbook for pastors, church leaders or Bible students may offer help. In this book, the authors show how Bible translations and Bible formats, for example, or family and church customs, levels of literacy or the way majority and minority languages interact in multi-lingual cultures, all affect the way we understand what we read, and in particular, what we read in the Bible. Next, this book suggests actions to help readers overcome the obstacles they face in reading the Bible with meaningful understanding. The book is structured so that individual chapters can be studied separately in workshops. And those who have studied a chapter can straightaway apply what they have learnt in their churches: they can immediately use this book to teach others! Questions, discussion topics and group activities for learners are included, as well as stories that illustrate the main ideas.

This book is intended to be used in courses or workshops for people involved in communicating Scripture across languages and cultures. The primary audience is Bible translators, but those who review translations and those who develop other Scriptures products will also find it helpful. Over the past thirty years, scholars have made significant advances in understanding how human communication functions. They have moved from looking for meaning in texts alone to seeing texts as providing clues that lead hearers to discover the speaker's intended meaning. Bible Translation Basics accomplishes two things: 1) it expresses these theoretical developments in communication at a basic level in non-technical language, and 2) it applies these developments to the task of Bible translation in very practical ways.

This book offers a broad-based, contemporary perspective on Bible translation in terms of academic areas foundational to the endeavor: translation studies, communication theory, linguistics, cultural studies, biblical studies and literary and rhetorical studies. The discussion of each area is geared towards non-specialists, to introduce them to notions, trends and tools that can contribute to their understanding of translation. The Bible translator is encouraged to appreciate various approaches to translation in view of the wide variety of communicative, organizational and sociocultural situations in which translation occurs. However, literary representation of the Scriptures receives special attention since it has been neglected in earlier, influential works on Bible translation. In addition to useful introductory and concluding sections, the book consists of six chapters: Scripture Translation in the Era of Translation Studies; Translation and Communication; The Role of Culture in Communication; Advances in Linguistic Theory and their Relavance to Translation; Biblical Studies and Bible Translation; and A Lterary Approach to Biblical Text Analysis and Translation. The authors are translation consultants for the United Bible Societies. They have worked with translation projects in various media and in languages ranging from ones of a few hundred speakers to international ones, in Africa, the Americas and Asia.

Best-selling author John Piper teaches us how to read the Bible in light of its unique ability to reveal God's glory in a way that informs our minds, transforms our hearts, and ignites our love.

The revised and enlarged second edition of J. Dudley Woodberry’s From Seed to Fruit expands on the next stage of the ongoing collaborative research and reflections of many people from many organizations desiring to bless Muslims. Seven additional chapters survey major trends in global Islam today and explore themes that prove to have considerable influence on fruitfulness, including a new chapter on building Christlike relationships with Muslims. The Global Trends Research Group has continued to update the demographic materials on Muslim people groups, their access to Christian witness, and when and how Christian groups covenant to provide meaningful access. From Seed to Fruit presents the most recent worldwide research on witness to Christ among Muslim peoples, using biblical images from nature to show the interaction between God's activity and human responsibility in blessing these peoples.