Scripture Non-Use - The Greatest Threat to Bible Translation - with Dr. Dave Eberhard

About this episode

Dr. Dave Eberhard discusses his research on the impact of language use on Bible translation and the implications for eliminating Bible poverty.

Dave Eberhard has done a large scientific study with other colleagues for progress.bible, and the results are devastating. This is something I’ve been trying to raise caution about for a long time, but now we have hard evidence and data to support a simple idea which Dave is calling The Sequencing of Translation Hypothesis . This states that the following general tendency holds in most multilingual communities: a local language translation does not become a Scripture of normative public use if a national/regional language has already become normative in that domain. In other words, if a language of wider communication like English or Spanish was the first language to become normative in church and spiritual life, then a local language translation will not be used and is not necessary. The consequences of this hypothesis would be that most of the languages currently listed as needing translated Scripture would be removed from that list, and put us extremely close to eliminating Bible poverty. Dr. David M. Eberhard is the General Editor of the Ethnologue. Read a prepublication draft of the paper on the Vanuatu study. View a slide presentation of the study's findings. ⁠⁠⁠⁠…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew Case

Guest: Dave Eberhard

Topics covered

• Bible translation
• Scripture non-use
• multilingual communities
• translation hypothesis
• Bible poverty
• church language use

Keywords

• Bible translation
• Scripture
• multilingual
• translation hypothesis
• Bible poverty
• Eberhard
• Vanuatu study

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: progress.bible, Ethnologue

Books & works: The Sequencing of Translation Hypothesis

Places: Vanuatu

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