[sword-devel] News from STEP Bible

[David Haslam]

Below is pasted from Facebook - FYI.

New Bibles in STEPBible!

Most people in the world speak at least two languages - their mother tongue and a majority language. They need the second language to learn at school, haggle in the market, and (often) to read their Bible. We'd like to give everyone a Bible in their mother tongue, but in the meantime, everyone can read it in an up-to-date version of their majority language - thanks to Biblica.

Biblica, The International Bible Society, is working with STEPBible to include all their majority-language Bibles in STEPBible to augment other traditional Bibles already available in these languages. These are currently available through the free website at www.stepbible.org and will later be available for the downloaded STEPBible offline version for those that have limited or no Internet service. This is especially important in the disadvantaged world which is STEPBible's primary target. STEPBible's free distribution policy coheres with Biblica's aim to make their Bibles available to all who wish to read them, especially new generations who have not yet discovered Jesus
Biblica owns and curates the NIV to ensure it keeps up with research and language changes. They aim to translate the Bible as accurately and idiomatically as a United Nations translator. For example, they changed the word 'booty' to 'plunder', and 'aliens' to ‘landless immigrants’. Biblica also supports about a hundred translation committees in other languages. These committees work on Bibles in 'majority' languages - i.e., the languages understood by the majority of people in the world. Those who speak minority languages are usually bilingual - they have to be - because they also need to know a majority language. So these majority languages are closer to being their ‘own’ language than a second language normally is.

These translations now available in STEPBible, like the NIV, are written in a contemporary version of the language, without confusing out-of-date terminology. Often a strict word-to-word translation is useful when studying the underlying Hebrew or Greek. At other times it is useful to read a contemporary language translation that is straightforward to help to understand a Bible passage. STEPBible can show both types of Bibles side by side, with links to the original vocabulary they are translating, and tools to investigate them deeply.

The best of all Bible reading experiences is therefore now freely available in STEPBible. Everyone can read an easy-to-understand Bible in a majority language accessible to them, alongside translations that reflect word order and language traits of the underlying Hebrew and Greek. This is the best way to read the Bible you love, and to study words in depth when you come across something intriguing.

We would love to learn about how you are using STEPBible. Your feedback will help us to develop and enhance its capabilities. Please respond with a note on how you use STEPBible. What ideas do you have to make STEPBible better? Do you know missionaries, church communities, or others who would benefit from STEPBible? If you haven't already, please tell them about this resource. Would you like to help mature STEPBible? Let us know what you're good at. We particularly need help with translations into other languages.

Every blessing
David Instone-Brewer and the rest of the STEPBible team.

Here’s the link to the post.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/StepBibleUsers/permalink/3547503835369685/

Best regards,

David Haslam
https://www.facebook.com/groups/StepBibleUsers/permalink/3547503835369685/

Sent from ProtonMail Mobile
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://crosswire.org/pipermail/sword-devel/attachments/20210101/94c73d89/attachment.html>