Bible Translation Seminars
As part of its ongoing and expanding program of professional development services, the Institute provides training seminars for several Bible agencies' translation staff: United Bible Societies, SIL International, The Seed Company. In 2011 three such seminars convened.
Translation Resources Seminar
September 26-29, 2011
Increasingly, the resources and skills needed for effective translation are becoming more sophisticated and diverse. In an effort to address the need for such resources and skills, the Institute will convene a seminar around the challenges that the search for such resources presents.
One presentation looked at the audiences whom translation resources target and offered a model for defining those audiences with more granularity than in the past. "One size resourcing no longer fits all" was the watchword of this presentation and its response.
Another presentation looked at the localization of resources under geographical and theological aspects. In the past resources have tended to reflect global interests and outcomes, not local ones. Likewise in the past, resources have often embedded global not local theological presuppositions in their design and implementation.
A final set of presentations looked at the technical platforms and means of delivery that will make resources available. Key elements of such platforms and means of delivery will be development costs, speed to market, functionality, and user friendliness. As new platforms and means of delivery are placed on line, new training and professional development opportunities will have to follow in their wake.
Intersemiotic Translation Seminar
March 7-11, 2011
Increasingly, mass media, pop culture, and digital technologies have changed the communication strategies and channels available to Bible agencies and churches. To address the particular case of Bible translation in this new communication and information culture, the Nida Institute convened a seminar on intersemiotic translation. The Institute chose this topic because it believes that modern semiotics offers Bible agencies and their translation staff a valuable tool for developing and assessing translation in a post-print environment. Crucially for working Bible translators, semiotics opens new avenues for recognizing, prioritizing, and selecting signs and meaningful structures.
The work of two renowned Italian semioticians (Umberto Eco and Paolo Fabbri) as well as recent work in cultural studies helped shape the semiotic presentations. Lectures by the other subject matter experts looked at translation in a wide variety of contexts, disciplines, and media: communications, linguistics, text criticism, and skopos as well as ethnomusicology, performance studies, sign language, and recent research on orality and media.
Alternative Modernities and Bible Translation
January 31 – February 4, 2011
The central thesis of this seminar asserted that in the last 60 years we have witnessed a seismic cultural shift in both our understanding of the world and our own place as citizens of God’s good creation. However the seminar describes that massive shift (the move from modernity to postmodernity; from an age of reason to an age of imagination; from a Eurocentric world to multiculturalism), what has taken place has deconstructed all inherited paradigms of Christian mission, practical ministry and engagement with the Scriptures and contemporary cultures. This seminar examined a new missiological map of the world drawn around markers called post-Christendom and post-secular; postmodern and postcolonial; post-global and post-material. In each case, the prefix ‘post’ means living in the world after these changes, not that we have somehow passed through them. Throughout, the seminar drew on new insights from Christian theology and hermeneutical theory. The pertinent question for this seminar is: How does this seismic shift inform the way we do Bible translation today?
