Sunday 28 March 2010

A creative commons Bible translation in German

Wolfgang Loest is one of the initiators of a brilliant creative, ecumenical online project to make two new creative commons translations of the Bible into German. The "Offene Bibel" idea is that there needs to be an online version of the Bible in German available to people and the churches that is not subject to copyright like the 1984 Luther translation.
The idea is to work on both a translation into modern everyday German and offer a study translation which would be closer to the sentence structure of the original biblical languages. And this online translation would be crowd-sourced - not a translation by a few professional translators but any Christian from whatever tradition who knows how to translate from Hebrew and Greek can participate. The project came about as a result of a conversation at last year's Bremen Kirchentag.
You can follow the progress of the translation here and read an interview with Loest about the details of the project here.
The association to support the project should be launched officially at the barcamp kirche 2.0 event in Frankfurt, if enough people turn up. I really hope it gets off the ground, crowd-sourcing an ecumenical Bible translation is a brilliant idea.

5 Comments:

Tobias said...

Really interesting idea. What I haven't understood yet: How do they agree on a (final) version? Is it the same way, Wikipedia works?

Jane said...

Not sure but maybe we should both go to the barcamp in Frankfurt to find out!

Dr B. said...

Maybe it could get an award
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/mar/30/digital-media-crowdsourcing-crowd-sourced-journalism

Wolfgang said...

Hi, yes it´s a bit like wikipedia, with the effect, that the Offene Bibel will be up to date over decades without the need of revisions (like the Lutherbibel). There are also (not really official) plans to print periodically a version which is edited by an editorial team book by book.
It would be a great pleasure to see you in Frankfurt (I would try to do my session in english).

Jane said...

wolfgang keine Sorge ich spreche sehr gut deutsch