Gospel Translations:Our model

From Gospel Translations

Web 2.0 Methodology

With our goal of increasing accessibility of biblically-sound resources, we can most easily be understood as a collection of services to facilitate the creation and distribution of translations:

• We partner with publishers and ministries to acquire licenses for the translation and distribution of their copyrighted materials
• This wiki facilitates translations by our volunteers, enabling online collaboration and peer review
• When translations are completed, this wiki also serves as the distribution portal where visitors can come and easily browse the resources available in various languages

While we are happy to host and distribute translations of older works as well, our current focus is on contemporary writings. There are several reasons for this, and perhaps the most obvious is that we want to make the work of translating as simple as possible for our volunteers. Thus the lack of emphasis at this time on "olde works."

Key Benefits

Volunteer-driven internet initiatives have proven successful in a broad set of disciplines, with perhaps software development and educational projects being the most prominent. We believe this model brings a lot to the table for translation and publishing too—namely:

• Economic efficiency: with overhead costs kept extremely low, accessibility does not need to be driven by financial considerations
• Quality: it's not just that anyone can improve on another's translation—the history of online collaboration projects suggest that someone almost always will. As the wiki grows and draws more experienced linguists, we trust that quality will only get better and better over time.
• Scalability: online projects like this have proven to scale very well from local start-ups to global initiatives, and we are building from the ground up on the same software that runs the world's biggest wikis
• Resource discovery: as the project spreads, we believe it will uncover a wealth of now-unknown resources within the church, from skilled translators to international authors