New Christian Bible Study
Project Update
Steve David
H
ere’s an update on the New Christian Bible Study Project. It’s going really
well.
In the summer, as part of our “Writings for Everyone” strategy, we ran a
highly successful translation-importing work session, led by Ben Cole, and
manned by high school and college students: Wes Wedell, Ben Conroy, Atticus
Boatman, Zack Lambertus and Sean Frost. With their help, we imported 51
more translations of books of the Writings in Korean, Japanese, German,
Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Dutch and Czech, bringing the total to 236.
It’s not just students helping, either. We’ve been really lucky to have contract
staff: Ben Cole and Annalisa Alden, and volunteers like Helen Ference, to keep
marking up translations and pulling them into the system.
We’re now offering the Writings online, linked to the Word and to each
other, in 17 languages, which are spoken by more than 3.7 billion people. It’s a
hugely important step for the New Church to be taking.
There are another 50 translations on-deck, waiting to be processed. We’ve
even got several in as-yet-unimported languages for us, Malayalam and Zulu.
There’s a lot of work in these 50, because we’ve done short works in each
language, to cut our teeth on them, and saved long ones like Arcana Coelestia
for last, when our importing tools are as good as they can get.
Speaking of importing tools, it’s taken hard work by Roy Odhner, Yan Sun,
Laird Cooper and others to get our importing system to the point where it
can correctly do the lion’s share of reference-tagging automatically, making it
much easier on the human taggers.
None of this would work without the dedicated translators and publishers
that seem to crop up throughout the New Church worldwide. The New
Church seems to grow more than its fair share of talented people – like Elaine
Kim, Henk Weevers, Bagrat Mamasakhvili, and Lenka Machova – who work
carefully to make Swedenborgian ideas available to their countrymen and
women. It’s inspiring!
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