The Gutenberg eBook: Once Again, The Bible Is At The Forefront Of Publishing Technology
from the mission:-innovation dept
It's well-known that movable-type printing started (at least in the Western world) with the Gutenberg Bible, which all-but-singlehandedly ushered in a new era of literature distribution. To this day, the Bible remains one of the most-printed books of all time, and it's interesting to learn that it still plays a role in pushing publishing technology forward. The Christian missionary initiative Every Tribe Every Nation (ETEN) is working to make ebook Bibles available in as many languages as possible, on as many platforms as possible—and in doing so, they're solving technical problems that few others are addressing:
Now, it turns out, the old missionary impulse is being turned towards some extremely difficult technical challenges: as Mark Howe [who works on the project] has said, "For all the issues that are still to be solved, ETEN is trying to do things that the world's biggest tech companies haven't cracked yet, such as rendering minority languages correctly on mobile devices. There's a unity among Bible translators and publishers that stands in stark contrast to the fractured, fratricidal smartphone industry." And of course, once these technical challenges are met, it won't be Bibles only that people can get on their mobile devices: whole textual worlds will open up for them.
Much of the innovation has to do with niche languages (they have translations in Potawatomie and Hawai'i Pidgin) and the developing world: ETEN is tackling translation challenges that are of low priority for many businesses since they aren't interested in entering those markets—at least not enough, or not yet. But if ETEN succeeds in making this kind of mass-internationalization easier, it will be sure to have a ripple effect as others make use of the technology. The Bible may once again be responsible for driving a communications revolution.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: bible, bleeding edge, community, innovation, translations
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Pidgin?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Pidgin?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Pidgin?
But it's nice to see religion actually working for the good even though it's not their primary intention. Now if they'd respect the non-religious ppl and didn't try to meddle into laws....
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
Think about what that means. First they have to learn the spoken language well enough to translate into it and then they have to make a translation of the bible into that language. It's quite a feat.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Cyrillic
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
Funny. I see plenty of atheists demanding that the religious expression of everyone who disagrees with them be quashed. And respect? That's a two-way street, sir. Show me an atheist that respects religious people, and I'll show you a Christian who respects atheism.
If what you mean is, "respect others' freedom to believe as they choose," I can point you to a whole lot. Any Christian with an ounce of historical knowledge knows just how dangerous it is to have the government start defining their faith for them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
Atheists are not quashing religious speech. They are quashing PUBLICLY FUNDED religious speech. Most Atheists would also quash a publicly-funded anti-religion speech. I certainly would.
My best friend is Christian, and I am an Atheist. We respect each other. Not an issue.
So please keep chuch and state separate. Thanks!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
Really? So there are plenty of examples of athiests going after "publicly funded" christian speech, but where are the examples of the same against anti-religion(christian) speech?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
Of course, almost exactly none of this persecution is taking place in the developed world, especially the English-speaking world.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
And that's all the proof anyone should need right there.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Pidgin?
It's a double edged sword, it was intended to cut both ways.
What happens to their tax exempt status when a church decides to contribute funds to a political campaign?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Pidgin?
Here's a sample (Psalm 23). It's fun to read:
Da Boss Above, he take care me,
Jalike da sheep farma take care his sheeps.
He goin give me everyting I need.
He let me lie down wea da sweet an soft grass stay.
He lead me by da water wea I can rest.
He give me new kine life.
He lead me in da road dat stay right,
Cuz I his guy.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Pidgin?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
another non-story..
are you (they) going to do the Quran ?
are they going to correct the mistranslations that are allready there ? such as the REED sea not the RED sea.
but typical of America to think they have the scoop on religion and that they have some right or obligation to force that religion on all TRIBES and NATIONS !!!!!
how many copies of the GB is there ? 48 wow, that IS some revolution.
it was not the Gutenburg bible that was significant, (in the US you use the RSV (or ASV), not Gutenburg's, nor did Gutenburg translate the bible, it was a simple printing of the King James bible.
But it is a quite news week I guess for Masnick, he has to make his money by saying SOMETHING !!, it's still about quantity at the expense of quality... SNAFU
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: another non-story..
It was just a figment of my immature imagination.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: another non-story..
[JARRING CHORD]
[The cardinals burst in]
Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn!
[To Cardinal Biggles] I can't say it - you'll have to say it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-story..
There was another outfit, many years ago, called Gospel Recordings. For similar purposes they sent people out in search of spoken languages, and created audio tracts. Their archives are probably quite important, if they still exist.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
Yeah, how dare some private organization spend their own money to translate a document they feel is very important to share it with the world! Down with this bogus freedom of speech idea! If they're gonna spend their money and sweat to do their own translations, then they should be forced to translate what I TELL THEM TO!!!!!!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
you can't, one translation say reed one says red, you can't prove which one was right
and wanted to translated to only make sense to you and today's language is even worse
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-story..
Do you translate it so that people understand the original meaning or so that they know where it is today? These are the types of choices that translators have to make, and neither one is "wrong".
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: another non-story..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Sea
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-story..
How many other errors are there? Do these kinds of things run far deeper than just a typo? Are they all just a bunch of charlatains?
Throw in a little "literalism" and things get really interesting.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: another non-story..
The people who "own" The Bible then are Jews and Christians. I suspect a lot of people here would be surprised, and, perhaps shocked at how often Jewish and Christian biblical scholars have poured over it over the past 2000 years to in efforts to correct translation errors and mistakes.
We're just a lot better than we used to be. Of course there are mistakes in translation.
As for literalism, the books of The Bible were never intended to be take literally. While a lot is oral history and tradition written down after the fact, in the case of the Old Testament during the exile in Babylon, in the case of the New Testament on oral remembrances, scraps of written material and even complete and now lost Gospels.
Historical facts are included in The Bible which has kept a number of scholars very busy for the past couple of hundred years but overall it is NOT a history, the gospels are NOT biography as we would know either.
As for mistranslating Reed Sea as Red Sea it's a fairly minor mistake even if it might make the escape from the Egyptians much less dramatic it still makes it possible as has been demonstrated there.
And no, to the vast majority of Christians and Jews the mistakes are quite acceptable and often enlightening in that they clarify what may have been confusing before.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-comment from darryl..
The Gutenberg Bible was in Latin, the Vulgate Bible, the standard Bible of the Roman Catholic Church of the time. The Authorized (King James) translation had yet to appear.
While the Bible itself, beautiful piece of work that it was and is, it's the movable type press that was introduced to Europe at the time that was revolutionary, the Chinese had had movable type for quite some time by that period. Equally revolutionary was using metal, lead, to cast the letters to that they could be recast, reused and corrected at will.
Without it it's arguable that the Protestant Revolution would have occurred, that the Enlightenment, Renaissance and the science we know would have happened. And certainly not the form in which they did.
The people behind ETEN are not interested in converting everyone, though they are carrying on the apostolic tradition, nor are they forcing anything on anyone. They've found and developed an ingenious way to translate the Bible into different languages using the power of the Internet, the Web, technology and, of course, biblical scholars probably both Christian and Jewish to do this.
I'd ask you to stop being an ignorant idiot but that's pointless so how about you take a vacation in the 11th Century? You'd be happy there.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: another non-comment from darryl..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
If you honestly believe they're trying to force Christianity on tribes and nations -- they aren't, they're letting people view the Bible, just as they will be letting people view the Koran, and hell, books made by Confuscius or others who decide to give these texts and translate them. All because a missionary group wants to translate the Bible, and pushing the technology to do so forward.
How is giving more options to more countries a bad thing? How is it a bad thing to do so? Nay, I think it is a wonderful thing. They are doing it not because they simply desire to give the Bible to others and let them read it for themselves -- but because they also want these nations, these tribes, to view other texts otherwise unavailable to them. There is far too much good that's being done here than there is evil being done here; they're not doing it for business, or even for profit. They're doing it because they want to do it, and want to provide an all new world for them that they would not have discovered otherwise.
If this is forcing nations and tribes to accept Christianity, I might as well be the long lost sister of a Dixie Chick who danced along in one of their shows only to ride away into the sunset never to be heard from again, because she wanted to help the ancient tribes and traditions of the Maori Partners for American Aliens or something.
Point is, this technology is wonderful and will bring many great things to the nations and tribes they are visiting; it is a looking glass window, wherein the other side of the glass is the wonderful world of text, learning, and knowledge. How is this a BAD thing, again?
Oh right, it isn't.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: another non-story..
2. The reed sea/ red sea thing isn't a matter of mistranslation. It's a matter of genuine debate. There are multiple different valid translations, and multiple potential crossing sites... that we know of. Since it was written approximately 3000 years ago, that can make things difficult in figuring out some of the
3. There are 48 surviving copies. It is unknown how many were printed. A low estimate is around 150. So, that makes 150 copies of a book, all of which are EXACTLY THE SAME, and took only a few years work by a single person, including type setting... At a time when it would take a single person several years to transcribe ONE COPY, and every copy was unique. As the first major book printed this way, bet your sweet ass it was a revolution.
4. You're right, Gutenberg did not translate the bible. No one has claimed that. But the King James bible was significantly later, and make possible by the Gutenberg bible. The comparison make it the article is an excellent one.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
joH'a' ghurmoH SoH! (God Bless You!)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
1. God "wrote" the Bible and
2. God always has been and always will be and
3. Copyright terms are Life + x years
4. God is all-knowing
5. God's power is infinite
Why isn't God complaining about people sharing copies of the Bible? Oh wait. Nevermind. God's not that stupid.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
2. What does any of this have to do with the point of the article? Nothing.
The point is not WHY it's being done but rather the fact THAT it's being done and the fact THAT it will be useful to others with unrelated purposes. It can even be useful for those who oppose the views those who are doing it in the first place.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
You have the choice not to walk into any of those merciless christian killing pinko commie nations. Non christian indigenous nations were offered no such option when confronted by earnest bible clutching Caucasians proclaiming 'We're missionaries from God; we're here to help you'.
Also: Gonna need to see a citation on your 'atheists killed 100 million people' factoid, and for fuck sake, as a catholic, could you have a word with Benny about priestly child predators, and maybe not trying to screw around with women's reproductive health?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Funny you should bring that up because Christians often perform much in the way of charity and humanitarian work. Also, nobody is forced to accept Christianity. Lastly, missionaries often put themselves at risk by going into dangerous territories, resulting in many of them being killed/martyred.
"Also: Gonna need to see a citation on your 'atheists killed 100 million people' factoid"
http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/
Current estimate: 149,469,610
"...as a catholic, could you have a word with Benny about priestly child predators, and maybe not trying to screw around with women's reproductive health?"
First of all, much less than 1% of all priests over the past several decades were proven to have committed acts of sexual molestation, most of those involving teenagers, not children. Furthermore, about 80% of all acts were homosexual in origin (ring a bell?). Molestation/sexual abuse occurs in EVERY walk of life. A child is at far greater risk of being molested by, say, a teacher than by a priest. The media chose to zero in on the Church so that it could force its homosexual/abortion agenda on the public.
As far as "women's health" goes, the Church does not force anyone to choose one way or another -- if people are going to have an abortion (murder their unborn child) or whatever else, that's their choice. BTW, I recall the media and certain groups trying to bully the Church into providing abortion, contraception and sterilization as part of their mandatory insurance coverage.
The message is clear: it's ok to smear and attack Catholicism at every turn but let's go out of our way to protect everybody else.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Also the media does not have a "homosexual/abortion agenda" there are groups that have a "protection of civil liberties and individual rights that are supposed to be guaranteed by the law" agenda that also utilize the media as an outlet to speak out against choose to impose their will on others.
And it's not just the Catholic church (although they have the longest history and are the most visible part of the entire group) that is to blame here. The entire right wing "Moral Majority" needs to learn that we are supposed to have a separation of church and state FOR A VERY GOOD REASON and STOP trying to pass laws to legislate their idea of morality on everyone else.
Furthermore, as I stated in my previous comment. NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with the point of the article so YOU opened yourself up to this criticism by bringing up the unrelated topic in the first place.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
...selflessness and genuine care for the individuals...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Really??? Are you that uniformed that you have never read about the millions that Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, Mao and many other atheist have killed? You just proved you are a joke.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Just consider
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Just consider
How's the Harry Potter into Swahili volunteer project going?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Just consider
So don't just smugly assume it hasn't happened yet.
It was done for other languages.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
My wish
I went to buy it in Kindle format but ended up not because the search is terrible. You can only get to the beginning of books based on how the author/publisher set it up. For a book like Psalms, you are going to end up paging through hundreds of pages to get to the chapter you want.
If someone would do a great, readable translation and open source it so people could set up innovative search methods on it, that would be awesome.
OSNOVA has done some nice search stuff with KJV since it is public domain, but KJV is unreadable and our church doesn't use it anyway.
http://store.osnova.com/Kindle-Bible-KJV-paragraphed_p_8.html
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: My wish
http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/#copy
http:/ /www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-King-James-Version-NKJV-Bible/#copy
I won't call the rules to be too onerous as you can lookup verses or chapters on biblegateway.com.
Yeah, a very searchable Kindle version would be nice.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Strange it seems...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"(Mis)uses of technology"?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "(Mis)uses of technology"?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Instead people seem to equate those who go to church and volunteer our time, service, and offerings as being used to impose an inquisition. I do not know another institution that does as much good in the world as the USA Christian Charity programs do...including the UN world food bank.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"The church say we should do this so let's make it law" - bad.
"I think we should do this, everyone who agrees vote for me and we'll make it law" - good.
The latter seems to be separating church and state as far as I can tell, but if their personal views are influenced by their religious ones, and they are voted for by other people with the same religion, then exactly nothing has changed! How to you propose keeping the views of a majority religion entirely out of government decision making processes with a democracy?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]