SOUTH ASIA GATEWAY LANGUAGE TRANSLATORS OPEN the GATES to TITUS
Imagine you had never heard of Noah’s Ark, Joseph’s many-colored coat, Moses and Pharaoh, or David and Goliath. You could not call on their inspiration and encouragement, because your language did not have those stories. You could not call on Jesus for salvation, because you did not know that he was the fulfillment of all those Bible stories. Your parents had never even heard of the Bible.
Then one day a friend pulls out his phone and plays those Bible stories with pictures flashing across the screen. You are intrigued. “Where did you get these stories? Are there any more?”
“They’re called Open Bible Stories,” he says. “Want to hear the rest?”
Yes!
unfoldingWord’s Open Bible Stories comprises 50 key Bible stories, from creation to Revelation, chosen for evangelism and discipleship, provided freely for translation and multimedia sharing in any language. unfoldingWord uses Open Bible Stories to serve the church and as a translation-skills primer for full Bible translation, but the power of the Gateway Language strategy doesn’t stop with Open Bible Stories.
Imagine again, as a church planter in a minority language group, that you could not take your house church through the Apostle Paul’s careful instructions about church life in the book of Titus. How would you teach them? What would be the authority for your teaching?
Then one day a fellow believer shares a copy of Titus in your mother tongue.
“I helped translate this, using a set of translation resources in the national language with amazing software,” he says. “It’s as accurate as can be, thoroughly aligned with the Greek New Testament.”
Like the smooth stones in David’s sling, big impacts can come in small packages. In Church-Centric Bible Translation, we call them book packages. Your friend has just shared how he used the Titus book package in the Gateway Language to translate Titus into this heart language.
A Gateway Language is most often a national language spoken by millions of people that is used to serve the Bibleless languages in that region as an excellent tool for their Bible translation. .
unfoldingWord’s book packages are a highly accurate and reliable way to produce every book of the Bible in a minority language. Each finished book package becomes the gateway to a nearby Bibleless language. The process begins with a book package created in English by unfoldingWord. It ends with four high-quality, high-value digital resources never before available to minority-language translators via the Gateway Language they understand. Those four resources include an easy-to-understand Bible text, a literal Bible text that helps them see the form of the original Greek, a comprehensive lexicon, and a Bible translator’s guide.
Each finished Open Bible Story represents a rigorous process too. Once completed, including audio versions, each OBS is a powerful evangelistic and teaching tool for church planters, pastors, and teachers.
One book of the New Testament used to take godly, dedicated missionary translators years, even a whole decade, to produce. Using the Gateway Languages strategy, church-centric Bible translators in South Asia are now making New Testament books available to 30 million people in their nation in a matter of months rather than years.
Join the Movement
Your investment will help empower church networks worldwide to translate the whole Bible into their ethnic languages for the very first time.
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