Our Partners
Volunteers wanted
Wanting to gift your God-given skills to the Bible world? Excited that your work could be freely reused by Bible translators across all the continents (especially in the smaller language communities) and for decades to come (because the source files are available for future revisions)? Yes, we need you!
Sadly we’ve seen examples of older people who’ve worked on Bible resources in their retirement years, but didn’t make their source files publicly available online. Often, their work or private website has disappeared offline once God called them home. If you’re in your later years and have skills to develop Bible resources, invest them into a project where everything is online and public and is free and open for everyone to use and to continue to build on and improve.
Programmers
We are looking for techo geeks in the Bible world to help us achieve this vision to provide a free and open, modern, new English translation. If you’re proficient in Python, Flutter/Dart, Rust, or Golang, please do contact us.
We also need programmers to include the OET into their existing Bible apps. Incorporating the OET will definitely take more effort than for conventional translations, because the design has both a Readers’ Version and a Literal Version that complement each other and are intended to scroll together (or be printed side-by-side), plus the fact that OET ‘books’ are presented in a different order and there’s no book named ‘James’. Also, terms like ‘New Testament’ do not apply to the OET.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Designers and artists
Are layout, colour groups, and CSS your cup of tea? (Ours is Bible translation.) Think you could make all of this more beautiful? If so, we could use you.
Could you provide black-and-white images to help our OET readers understand the text? Or colour diagrams or maps that could be at the back of an open-licenced Bible? We certainly need you!
Readers and checkers
Are you a word-crafter? As OET books are being drafted, we need readers to look at the English style. When translating, it’s sometimes difficult to get the Greek words and word order out of your mind and to think about how we’d get the same thing across in our modern English. Other times we might have chosen a modern idiom, but one that’s not well-known in other English-speaking nations. So we need readers to let us know if they can help make the Readers’ Version more fluent and natural.
Bible consultants
If you’re a Bible translation consultant and/or a Hebrew or Greek expert, we would value your help in checking our drafts for accuracy and also for making suggestions for improvement. Perhaps you could keep the OET in a small window while you’re checking a translation in another language. Any feedback would be helpful.
Because the OET is a fresh translation from the Hebrew and Greek (and not based on other English translations), there’s a higher chance that our initial drafts will contain errors, i.e., there’s many places in an English Bible translation where the meaning of the original writer could be interpreted differently. That’s ok, unless we’ve interpreted the original languages wrongly! We don’t want that.
Topic specialists
Perhaps you have a certain speciality and would like to improve or expand our drafts of the book introductions, or write a set of footnotes about some helpful topic. One advantage of working in an open translation, is that your scholarship is then freely available to future generations as well.
We would like to have sets of open-licensed, specialist footnotes and/or study-notes that can be programmatically swapped in and out in order to produce specialist Bible websites and/or specialist printings. These include things like:
- notes for Muslim, Hindu, atheist, etc., readers
- notes on theological and doctrinal issues
- notes linking the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’ (Old Testament) with the ‘Messianic Update’ (New Testament) and vv.
- notes on archaeological discoveries
- textual criticsm notes
- and more...
Language Experts
The OET dream is actually a huge one that could extend towards other languages beyond English. Did you know that in many less prominent languages of the world, the names of the Bible characters were adapted or transliterated from the major language (e.g., English or Spanish or French) names, and not from the Hebrew or Greek names? So that means in some cases for example, the people’s Hebrew names were translated in Greek, then into English or Spanish, etc., then into the country’s national language, and then into the country’s minority languages. Could this be improved? Not easily because of the power of tradition, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
Did you know that the NZ Māori (Te Reo Māori) Bible does not necessarily use their best term for God (Atua)? Wow, changing that now would be a huge change! Also, did you know that some important Biblical terms were just invented instead of translated. For example, Eph. 6:2, “Honour your father and mother…” became “Whakahonoretia tou papa me tou whaea…”. Could this be improved? Yes, it could! Similarly for Rom. 2:10, “but glory, honor and peace for everyone…” became “He kororia ia, he honore, he rangimarie, …”.
What about your language? Could the Bible translation you use be improved? Are the commercial Bible publishing companies interested in doing this? If not, maybe we could work together with you?
Just to clarify, we’re not here to judge those who’ve gone before us and on whose shoulders we all stand. But times certainly change and languages constantly change as well, so maybe the Bible translation world can also be challenged to update and improve?
Typesetters
Are you an expert in Paged.js? Or SILE Typesetter? Or PTXprint? If someone could do the layout for us, we could focus on completing, checking, and improving the Bible text itself.
(In May 2023, we created one very-basic test copy of the two-column OET with two gospels using PTXprint, but we're ready now to start looking at something more serious.)
Sponsors wanted
We also need financial help for this project to advance at full speed. Although most of the work is done by volunteers, we do need to cover our computing costs (domain names, servers and services, internet, electricity) as well as books and reference materials, travel and conferences. Then there’s also printing costs—only for small test runs of Bible portions at this stage. We would also like to be able to pay for services from contract programmers and web developers. Again, please use the contact page to get in touch directly.