Sovereign Grace Ministries is one of a growing number of ministries (including Desiring God and 9Marks) working with and supporting Open Source Mission. The goal of OSM is to build a community of volunteer translators who will collaborate to make gospel-centered resources available in as many languages as possible. Once the books or articles are translated, the finished translations will be available online for free at gospeltranslations.org. It will function like Wikipedia, but instead of producing encyclopedia entries, the content will be translations of Christian books and articles.
Because the majority of Christian materials are published in English, the lack of sound biblical material is a very significant need for non-English speaking churches. OSM is currently working with publishers to build up their copyright library, and are hoping to get as many volunteer translators involved as possible. If you or anyone in your relational network would be interested, you can download a brochure here that provides a fuller explanation of how OSM operates and how you can get involved. Of if you’d like to talk to a real person, you can e-mail Andre Ye at andre@opensourcemission.com.
The Church is growing very quickly outside of the English- speaking world, and serving as a translator with OSM is a very unique and strategic way to serve our brothers and sisters around the globe.
On a side note, if you’d be interested in working on a translation of my book when it comes out, please let me know.
Wow! Thank you Bob for blogging on this subject. If I may add, I live in Québec, the only French speaking province of North America. I can tell you that for many people (like my parents) who do not speak English and knowing that there is so many good resources around them, but they cannot access them it is very frustrating. Getting books, and articles translated in the native language of a country is extremely important. The joy on these people’s face is so beautiful to see when they can read something that is very good doctrinaly. So please, if you can translate text in another language, this is an excellent opportunity to serve them effectively.
Thanks!
Bob I have some of your articles (the ones you wrote to Crosswalk.com) and they are published in our site (I asked permission to and you gave it to me) I could help you in the spanish translation, write me an email to keep this chat if you are interested) you can see your articles tranlated in
http://www.entrecristianos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=13&id=38
Bob,
Thanks for this post. It is so exciting for me to learn about OSM and the work they are doing. Being fluent in German, I provide translations at work on an almost daily basis. I have been interested in finding a way to use this skill for the church as well, but I didn’t know where to start to look. I am excited to find out more about this possiblity! Thanks!
Bob,
I have a very talented team of translators here at Raleigh Chinese Christian Church. Some of them are even authors, schoolteachers, professors (or former ones of the above). I believe your book would be very helpful to Chinese churches in American and abroad (I have certainly benefitted from all your seminars and articles related to worship). If you’d like, I can ask them to see if they’d be interested in helping with translating your book.
Incidentally, the choir director for our Mandarin Choir is quite adept at translating songs into singable translations in Chinese (i.e. more than just “translate by concept,” he can translated the idea of a song and its lyrics to be usable, in a short amount of time too.
When I first thought of posting this I thought that it was a little off topic for this blog. Guess I was wrong.
Enrique and Andy, I’d love to chat more about the possibility of translating my book. Thanks for even being willing to consider doing that! E-mail me through the “contact Bob” button below.
And Gabriel, if you know anyone who might be able to translate my book into French, let me know!