OET Printing Recommendations

Introductions

Because the ‘O’ in OET stands for ‘open’ (see Licence), then we can only make recommendations about how any other partner chooses to print it. Remember that the OET was developed as a free resource for the English-speaking world, but at the same time, it aims to educate the reader about how our Bibles come to us, and some of the ambiguities and difficulties and different possibilities in that process.

If you follow these recommendations, then we both recommend and encourage you to use our name ‘Open English Translation’ for your published work. On the other hand, if you’ve made changes to the text or format that goes against the recommendations below, then we’d ask that you clearly state: ‘Adapted from the Open English Translation’ (along with the formal attribution and anything else legally required by the licence).

Two versions side-by-side

The name Open English Translation includes two versions intended to be printed in side-by-side columns: the ‘Readers’ Version’ and the ‘Literal Version’. The textual content (including footnotes) of each of those two versions, makes the assumption that the other version is available right next door for reference, i.e., the ‘Literal Version’ assumes that the ‘Readers’ Version’ is there to help the reader make more sense of it, and the ‘Readers’ Version’ assumes that the ‘Literal Version’ is right there to give access to the literal rendering. (In the future, we plan to include a set of optional footnotes for the ‘Readers’ Version’, where we feel that it’s necessary to enunicate the literal text to the reader, but that hasn’t been done yet.)

Readers’ Version only

If you choose to print only the ‘Readers’ Version’ and want to use the ‘Open English Translation’ name, we would encourage you to include a clearly visible page in the front matter that tells the reader that this translation was designed to have the ‘Literal Version’ beside it, and hence it doesn’t yet contain adequate footnotes (where we’ve chosen only one of two or more possible renderings of the literal text).

If you choose not to give that disclaimer, then we’d prefer you to state: ‘Adapted from the Open English Translation’.

Literal Version only

If you choose to print an edition that only contains the OET ‘Literal Version’, then we’d prefer that you title it ‘Open English Translation Literal Version’ and include a clearly visible page in the front matter that explains that the ‘Readers’ Version’ is also available and recommended for easier reading to get an overview of the message, i.e., to see the forest rather than doing a close-up inspection of the trees.

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