About This Project

The ministry of Context Scripture Translating encourages and supports scripture translation in major languages.

Nearly thirty years ago, a small group of missionaries working in Central Europe founded Context Scripture Translating to address the Bible translation needs of major languages. Not only did we find that many people were challenged by the language of the Bibles used in our local ministries, but we also witnessed the dire need for new scripture translations in the many countries that emerged from communist regimes during the “opening” of Eastern Europe around 1990.

Updates of existing translations will not mitigate the problem, as many major language translations are based on ancient forerunners. They often do not reflect the manuscript discoveries of the late 19th or early 20th centuries, nor do they apply modern translation and linguistic approaches to the translation process. Very few major language translations are actually targeted for a specific readership within a major language. As we have established through our ministry, one of the key problems in understanding the scriptures is the user’s inability to recognize the writer’s context and how it relates to what the writer has written. This represents a major breakdown in the communication process.

To improve major language translations, our objective is to teach and train individuals, men, and women, to become mother tongue translators of the New Testament scriptures within the borders of their own language group. First of all, each individual must have a clear contextual understanding of the New Testament writings in order to be a good translator. Secondly, each individual must achieve a basic working knowledge of koine Greek and of the tools available in their language to work successfully in the New Testament texts. Thirdly, each individual must have a desire and the verbal ability to translate these texts from the Greek text into their target language by applying the author’s overriding statement of literary context.

We are involved with many people who are in this process of becoming “Grassroots Translators.” Many tools have already been developed to assist people in this process, including the form of the New Testament Greek text that supports accuracy and efficiency in the translation process. In the future, these tools and texts will be made available through a digital platform to those who are seriously interested in becoming Grassroots translators.

We are looking for people who want to understand God’s word contextually and become skilled workers in the New Testament Greek scriptures. There is much work to be done in text-checking the Greek text from Codex Vaticanus, as well as inputting all this information into XML code to make it universally available to web users.