Community-based Translation

Extracted text from When_Change_Happens_-Crowd_Sourcing_and_Bible_Translation__v4.pdf:

When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation 1

1. Introduction The author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation suggests that change happens when you take a configuration and rearrange it in new ways. 2 His point is that most new ideas are not the result of something coming from nothing. It has more to do with aggregating proven things and rearranging them in new ways for greater effects. An example of this is the work of a business man named Johannes Gutenberg. He is popularly known in the West as the person who invented the printing press in 1441. Actually, printing presses with removable type face had been around for about 400 years. Gutenberg is more accurately remembered for how he rearranged existing printing press technology. He also added the screw press, borrowed from wine makers, and he devised a method for rapidly removing and replacing metal type face. His rearrangements and improvements resulted in cheaper more commercially viable printing. In other words, he opened up document duplication to the masses.

The first full volume book to be mass produced by any printing press was the Bible. From the time of Christ to the 1,400s, the Bible had been translated into only 11 languages. No doubt handcopying dampened peoples enthusiasm for the mass marketing of Bibles. By the end of the 14th century, the Protestant reformation was gaining strength, and a mark of that people movement was the notion that everyday believers should read the Bible. So it appears that Gutenbergs printing press innovations coupled with the growing Protestant Reformation produced a greater demand for Bibles in languages other than Latin, German, and English. Only fifty eight years after Gutenbergs work, Bible translations were completed in thirty five languages. It was a tripling of Bible translation within a very short span of time resulting from the desire of common people to have access to Scriptures in their heart language and the utilization of improved technology at the time. It is apparent that at certain points in history key technological innovations can be directly correlated with the accelerated growth of Bible translation. By the mid to late 19th century, typewriters, communications, and rapid transportation (relatively speaking) generated a lot of change, and Bible translation surged with that change. As a result, by 1920 an additional 600 more language translations were completed. 3 In the early 1980s, the personal computer brought affordable word processing and immediate printing capability to the masses. Ten years later, the internet and email revolutionized communications. And associated with missionary use of these innovations was the completion of more than 1,200 language translations within a span of only ten years. Clearly God has been moving throughout recent history to spread his Word to all to people and languages. Technological innovation has contributed significantly to the surge in Bible translation work, and it appears the surge is intensifying now in the 21st Century. As of 2010, there are now about 2,500 languages with translations with an additional 2,000+ translations in progress. This leaves about 2,200 of the worlds 6,990 languages with no translations. It is conceivable that Bible 1

When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation translation work can be progressing in all of these remaining languages within the next fifteen years because of existing technology, among other factors.

2. Rearrangements: New Ways of Doing Old Things

These days, technological innovation still has much to do with rearrangements. That is, people are using new and existing technology in new innovative ways. For example, phones are not new; they are now just disconnected from land lines and they are cheaper and smarter. The computer desktop and web browser software has been around since the 1990s, but now those are increasingly based in the clouds. The internet is old (in tech years) but it is increasingly faster and reaching more places than ever before. 4 In fact, internet penetration around the world is binding all sorts of tools called Web Apps together and giving more people access to them than ever before. Its just up to inventive people to rearrange the parts to suit their needs. This means ever larger numbers of people can work together from wherever they happen to be. And as a wise saying goes, there is strength in numbers. 5 In fact, a few people in recent history have demonstrated that there is strength in really big numbers, like large crowds of people.

Linus Torvalds is one person who learned how to harness the innovative power of large crowds. In 1991 he developed a computer programming source code that he called Linux. Rather than protect it, he opened it up to the general public and asked for comments. Five of the first ten people who responded sent bug fixes and code improvements. Eventually, thousands of programmers working for free contributed thousands of hours making improvements to his code. 6 One lesson learned from this is, when people have vested interest in a project, they are likely to work hard to improve it. In a sense, they become co-owners of the project they helped to produce, but in the case of Linux, it was not for personal financial gain. It was for the good of the community the contributors belong to. This open source concept is now commonly applied to the development of other kinds of software applications.

The open source concept associated with Linux has become a metaphor for opening up all sorts of things to larger group participation. Wikipedia is another example of open source collaboration. It is allowing a vast number of people to help improve encyclopedia knowledge. That web site defines the phrase open source as either a philosophy or a pragmatic methodology, and indeed it seems to be both. Philosophically, it means that more people have the opportunity to collaborate on things important to them, rather than just relying on the work of a small homogeneous group of experts. Pragmatically, it means that far more perspectives are added to the mix, which as the Linux experiment revealed, can vastly improve the product under development. It also means that open source can be hi-jacked to develop competing products. As we will see a little later, controls need to be in place to protect the integrity of a collaborative effort, but determining the right point to install the controls is important. Another notion closely related to the concept of open source collaboration is crowdsourcing. Both concepts work to increase the range of skills and abilities applied to an effort by insuring that more people are involved. In a book called The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki demonstrates

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation through a series of stories and events in history how the collective wisdom (or collective intelligence) of a very large mix of disparate and generally uncontrolled people (the crowd) is wiser than a small group of homogenous thinkers, even if some of the group members are experts. 7 The authors point is not that the intelligence of a few experts is irrelevant. Torvalds intelligence was a good starting point for Linux. But according to Surowiecki, the intelligence of a few trained people alone cannot guarantee different perspectives on a problem. Grouping only smart people [or experts] doesnt work well because smart peopletend to resemble each other in what they do. 8 Research done by Surowiecki reveals the following: Groups (the crowd) made up of smart agents (e.g. experts) and not-so-smart agents (the people at large) always did better than a group made up of only smart agents. Groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives. If you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, youre better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.

You may be wondering (or understanding) by now what all of this has to do with Bible translation. It may seem to some people that opening up the work of Bible translation to a large crowd of inventive-minded thinkers and tinkerers is a recipe for disaster, at least in terms of the handling of something as sacred and important as Gods Word. Before we discuss that concern, lets consider a few questions. First, can the existing and necessary parts for doing Bible translation be rearranged in a way that could actually produce a better translation than has been previously produced in a given language? Second, could that rearrangement produce a much better first-time translation for languages that have never had a translation? Third, could it produce the translation in far less time and at a significantly lower cost than it has traditionally taken a small group to produce?

3. Translation practice: Reformation to Post Modernity

Reading the introduction to some current English language Bibles (See the NIV, CEV, ESV) 9 indicates that the method for doing Bible translation is still largely unchanged since the time of the Reformation. In terms of crowdsourcing, American and European English language translation work has been comprised of a small homogenous group of experts of one field: Biblical languages. The introductions to those translations reassure the reader that many Biblical language scholars were involved in the translation. Understanding how well the end users of the translations would understand and interact with the text has been less important so expertise in that area has not been generally sought. 10 Some people would say that the latter activity is not part of a translators task, if they assume that translation is simply meaning transfer from one language to another. The point is that a small group of experts can exert a lot of power and translators are not above suspicion. They bring certain ideology to their work based on traditional conformity inherited from others. 11 In this sense, they impose a certain way of translating on the wider community. Therefore, crowdsourcing could be viewed by some as a challenge to the power position held by the small

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation group of experts. Even so, Bryan Harmelink questions the ethics of a small group of experts exerting power through their ideology in translation, largely apart from the larger community. 12

The translator usually worked with a few capable first-language speakers to produce good quality translation drafts. To broaden group involvement, the translators usually tested the translation with a small number of people from the community. That often involved those people answering a series of questions about the text under review. Even if the translator was a first-language speaker of the language in which they were translating, they still applied this translation method, as they were trained to do so by Western translation agencies. With this method of translation, the community heavily depends on only a few expertssometimes only oneto achieve success in the translation work. Diversity is clearly lacking with this model of translation. And as mentioned earlier, diversity helps because it adds multiple perspectives that inform decision making.

The Western expansion of missions and Bible translation during the last 200 years continued the way translation was done from the time of the reformation. However, the expert (the translator) was typically not a biblical languages scholar, per se, or a first-language speaker 1 of the language in which he or she was translating. But because these people were the primary translators, they needed to become a local expert in exegesis (knowing what the biblical words meant) and languages (knowing how to decode meaning from one language and encode that meaning in another language).

4. Bible Translation in the 21st Century

These days, Bible translation is increasingly becoming the work of first-language speakers, particularly speakers of minority languages that have no previous translation. The way that Global South Church theologians and pastors talk about Bible translation these days sounds very foreign to Western ears. They talk more about the necessity of practical theological understanding as a goal of translation. They say it must address their own situation, which demands awareness of their own cultural context. It must address everyday physical and spiritual matters in holistic ways with no clear dichotomy between the two, as Western people tend to make. Finally, they focus more on the incarnational nature of the Word. The implications of how translation work is done are significant in light of these goals.

This begs the question, is the Western post Reformation method of doing Bible translation still a good fit for these times? That is, should translation work still be carried out by a small group of experts in only two fields (exegesis and language), or could the concept of open source collaboration be applied to the process? The open source concept allows more of the community of people at large to participate in the process insuring richness of diversity. The crowdsourcing concept insures that there are enough people who possess varying knowledge and insight to 1

Sometimes people use the term mother-tongue speaker or native speaker, depending on cultural sensitivity to the use of certain terms.

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation provide an aggregation of information that surpasses the expertise of a small group of trained translators and exegetes.

5. 21st Century Rearrangements

The notion of a large group of people successfully working together to produce a Scripture translation has much to do with who those people are. For example, according to Beth Hennessey, The Eastern view of creativity is far less focused on products or other tangible evidence of work produced. Instead, creativity is seen to involve personal fulfillment 14 In other words, the process is just as important as the product, if not more so. Yet, launching and completing a Bible translation project requires organization, schedules and benchmarks. Therefore, the methods proposed in this paper assume both task-oriented and process-oriented people working together. The following list gives important parts of a translation project that need to be controlled well in order to produce a good translation. How can these parts be rearranged in a way that results in acceleration of the work? How could a rearrangement produce higher quality (i.e. more accurate and more useful) translations considering the practical ways the end users will apply the translated Scriptures these days? Important Parts of the Translation Process Exegesis Key theological terms Linguistic naturalness Common understanding (interpretation) Orthography Spelling and grammar consistency Genre style (narrative, poetry) Discourse cohesion Media (best forms of communication) Scripture engagement

To crowd-source translation work, the key is assembling large groups of people. This has not been easy or pragmatically possible in most translation situations, especially with large language groups. However, greater access to the internet now makes this doable. It may actually even make it more feasible. Cramming a large group of people in a room to generate collaborative work in a short span of time has its challenges. There may be cultural dynamics which prevent younger people from speaking when older people are present. In some cultures a women may be reticent to express her opinions or ideas in the presence of men. As a whole, group members are limited in their ability to express their own creative thoughts simply because of the amount of time it takes to process everyones contribution. However, recent research indicates that increased utilization of internetbased collaboration helps groups to overcome some of the limitations of large group face-to-face interaction to more fully tap their creative power. 13 Could this sort of creative power produce better Scripture translations sooner?

6. Crowdsourcing: Translation Testing and Review Crowdsourcing is the methodological framework or the context within which the translation process takes place. It is the space where the translation network exists. The simplest way to apply

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation crowdsourcing to Bible translation is for the trained translation team to post a known good translation in a major language (e.g. regional language) that most of the people know well, and then ask them to show how they would write that translation using their language. It may be a nave attempt, but it gets the community involved. What they produce could be revealing to the experts.

The teamwork process must be well-managed so that the community understands what their role is. Then they may address anything in the text for the purpose of improvement. The assumption behind the crowdsourcing concept is the larger the group, the more improvements will be made in all areas in the list above. Significantly, each part of the process is applied in a simultaneous and highly iterative way, and it is more cyclical than linear. Design Guru Kevin Kelly learned from experience that constant incremental iteration is a far sounder approach. You build a quick prototype and get it in front of users to see what they do with it. You will always be surprised. 16 Clay Shirky makes the same point, stressing the importance of early feedback loops. This is an area that the classical approach to translation has been the weakest. 17 This way the large group aggregates a wider set of skills and knowledge which surpasses the expertise of the small group of trained translators at any given time.

Another way to apply the open source approach is for a translation team to make the first draft (early attempt) available to the community at large by posting the text on a secure and monitored internet collaboration site. The idea is to construct a virtual meeting place where the community (the crowd) can interact with the Scripture text itself and also with one another over the text. This is more of a communal way of learning exegesis, for example. They can connect with the community by using a smart phone, through an internet caf computer, or a laptop computer connected to the internet via a land line or a satellite terminal. These connectivity solutions are already widely available and people in remote places, such as the deserts of North Africa 15 are already using them.

Compare this arrangement with the traditional Western arrangement where the parts of translation are carried out in an incremental and linear fashion by a small group. It is linear in that, first language is analyzed, key terms are decided upon, exegesis is done, and then translation begins. By the time the translation draft reaches the wider community for comment it has largely become codified and therefore less open to major revisions. The following overly simplified graphics illustrate these two arrangements of the translation process. The small group linear approach may involve some iterativity, but to a low degree. It is still a linear-driven model from the start. The Crowdsourcing method is highly iterative and cyclical with movement along a linear cline as it progresses. This latter notion is not represented in the graphic.

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation

Crowdsourcing Simultaneous

Small Group Linear Incremental

7. Process for Including the Community There are different ways to seek input from the community utilizing on-line collaboration: 1) the translation team could ask the community to simply use a voting method designed for their cultural context that allows them to grade each area in the list given earlier. This is combined with methods to elicit feedback, typically through comments. There could be multiple votes to hit on multiple facets of the translation; 2) the team could post a series of questions to guide the community in areas that need specific input; 3) they could allow the community to post comments, ask questions, point out errors and make suggestions for improvements. Recurring improvements are made by the community until the point when the project leaders determine that the translation quality has achieved optimality for the time being. After this, the translation is ready for broad community distribution.

This sort of broad community involvement can greatly improve every aspect of the translation. One particularly significant area that would benefit by wider community involvement is the development of key theological terms. In regard to open source collaboration, theological terms are

It is still important for collaboration to include people who are trained to do exegesis. This is still a highly critical role. If the translators have done their exegetical homework well, then they will know when the comments from the community are confirming exegetical accuracy or revealing its inaccuracy. The translators should know when contributors from the community are changing the text into something different.

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation not computer source code. But as flawed source code can degrade the entire software program, likewise weak or inaccurately communicated theological terms can greatly weaken or degrade a translation, especially in light of what that translation is meant to accomplish these days (see 4).

8. Open Source Translation: Community Drafting

An innovative thinker said, Innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the edge of chaos: the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy. The same person also said, Collaboration will fail if excessive order is traded for excessive chaos.18 Too much order in the way translation has been done in the past has prevented the development of better more useable translations in several places. Is it possible to create this fertile zone in translation by inviting the wider community of people, especially the pastors, church planters and other workers who will use the translation to participate in drafting Scripture from the very start via an on-line collaboration site? Could the wider community of people, whether they live in the area, a different region, or even a different country in the case of diaspora, also participate in the drafting process? Early translation drafts produced by one or two trained translators can be of pretty good quality. Their drafts may also be of poor quality. But as mentioned earlier, after the first draft is completed it tends to be difficult to restart. This is because the shape of the first draft becomes codified and viewed as unchangeable in major ways by the community of users. Therefore, they only feel free to suggest minor adjustments. Few translators are willing to re-start the drafting process if community testing reveals that the draft is poorly done. Instead, they will make incremental changes to try and fix the bigger issues. This is the concern about too much control by a small group of people.

Establishing open source translation collaboration would require a few things. First, it requires a source text for people to translate from. National language and trade language translations that the people can read would be some of those source texts. These days, typical up-to-date translations in major languages have smoothed out a significantly large portion of the exegetical challenges that any receiving language must deal with. Therefore, it is not necessary for every person to revisit the original biblical languages in order to translate, at least not every verse. Most cross-cultural translators during the last sixty years have heavily utilized a variety of translations, commentaries and biblical language dictionaries to ensure exegetical accuracy. Few people are expert enough to exegete straight from the biblical language texts, and even some of their interpretations may be unsupported by mainstream Bible commentaries. That skill was certainly necessary during earlier times. Now exegetical knowledge is broad and well-documented in comparison to those earlier days. This knowledge is now highly and often freely accessible from the internet and CDs.

Another source text for community drafting used more and more these days is the front translation, also called reference translation or source translation. These translations are produced in major trade languages to serve as a source text for translators. The production method takes an average or good trade language translation, like Malay in eastern Indonesia or Tagalog in the Philippines, and makes further adjustments to the translation on things the translators will likely encounter in

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation their own translation work. By using these reference translations, translators have been able to produce high quality first drafts. 19 These sorts of reference translations are well-suited for open source community drafting. Still, there needs to be people on the team who are trained to do exegesis. Their role is to monitor the translation work to see where it wanders from original meaning. They also need to have a good understanding of the historical context in which the biblical texts were first communicated. This insures that the meaning of certain passages makes sense to people in their modern context.

9. The Open Source Translation Community

Importantly, crowd-sourcing the translation work can help to contextualize the translation. This means, the translation addresses the particularities of the people groups own language, religion, and cultural heritage, making the translation more understandable and relevant in their situation. This is because a greater accumulation of their skills, gifts, and knowledge are being applied to the translation. This aggregation is far greater than what any small team of translators could ever dream of applying on their own. 21

A team of people trained in translation principles and exegetical analysis leads the process. These people are the project leaders. They inform the community participants when their contributions to the translation work are causing the text to wander from the original biblical meaning. They also affirm peoples contributions that move the text closer to that biblical meaning in significant ways. This process educates all of the parties involved: the trained translation team; the exegetical consultant; and the community of translation contributors. This sort of group learning is applied to additional translation work. All of the participants become smarter because they are connected to the translation community via the Web. The entire translation community grows in its collective translation skills, too. 20

10. Confirming Translation Quality and Fidelity

The open source and crowdsourcing concepts have major implications when it comes to who indeed confirms the quality and accuracy of a translation. The traditional Western method still depends on a very small group of people. The group typically consists of the translator(s) and an outside translation consultant. The outside consultants do not generally know the language they are

When it comes to quality control, self-monitoring for accuracy (or fidelity) seems to be a natural occurrence with open source collaboration. When people work together on something they highly value, they develop a greater sense of ownership. That was true of the Linux open source code experiment. It motivated many people to guard the integrity of the source code. Torvald did not have to monitor all the changes alone. Thousands of people with a personal stake in the process helped. This is likely to be true with a communal open source approach to Bible translation drafting and review, as well, especially because it is Gods Word. If people have a high view of Scripture then they will likely guard the integrity of it in the process of refining it. This is a phenomenon common to many social networks and it is well-documented in the social sector. 22 Testing this will reveal if it is true in the religious sector.

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation checking for fidelity and quality, therefore they depend on an oral or a written translation of the work under review produced in their own language. This means they actually analyze a translation through the filter of another language. Some agency consultants only spot check certain books while consultants from other agencies check every verse. Either way, all of these consultants only gain a glimpse at what is in the translation. This method is time consuming, but it does yield some reasonably good evidence in regard to fidelity. Confirming quality is probably a lesser outcome. While their analysis is helpful, it is hardly exhaustive. Yet, it is their approval that allows a translation to be published or not. This is hardly the precise science that we Western-trained academicians have understood a consultant review to be. Applying the notion of crowdsourcing to this area means that a wider community, (the crowd) with guidance from experts, can confirm the quality and accuracy of a translation far better than a small group of 1-3 translators working with an outside translation consultant. Indeed, according to the crowdsourcing concept, the consultants are already part of the crowd and so their expertise is being applied along with all the other skills and abilities the larger community brings to the process. Therefore, applying the traditional consultant review as the last step in a crowd-sourced translation project seems redundant by that time, if indeed consultants have participated more regularly as part of the crowd through face-to-face meetings and by means of on-line collaboration. This is another rearrangement of the translation parts that could change the way translations are reviewed and approved for publication. It would also remove the bottleneck that develops when a translation team waits for an available consultant to give their stamp of approval on the translation.

11. Summary

The ideas expressed in this paper are based on well-documented phenomena in the social sector (see Shirky, Surowiecki, Johnson, and Paulus in the End Notes). How would crowdsourcing and open source collaboration work in the Bible translation sector, where spiritual beliefs run deep and assumptions of how things are done held tightly? Field testing will begin to provide insights over the feasibility of the ideas discussed in this paper. Currently, they are by-in-large mostly ideas. However, given the times, new things should be tried. A communal approach to translation can provide deeper and broader impact sooner because when people grapple with the truths of Gods Word, many of them come to faith. This has happened with small translation teams, so it should happen on a larger scale as part of a communal approach to translation when more people are invited into the translation process.

This is the difference between a community doing translation together for one another in comparison to a small closed group of people doing translation for the community. With the former method, the community is more likely to use the translation in a greater variety of ways sooner because it is, after all, a result of their collaborative effort. With the small closed translation team approach, these effects are not usually realized on a large scale until long after the translation is completed and handed over to the community for them to use, if they ever widely use the translation at all.

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When Change Happens: Crowdsourcing and Bible Translation The internet and smart phone technology opens up the community to greater participation among non-literate people who in the past could not be more fully involved in a translation project because of the reading requirement. Now visual images from the JESUS Film coupled with recordings of regional language translations by FCBH 23 can be accessed via the Web or downloaded to a smart phone. By utilizing these resources, a non-literate person gains a deeper understanding of how important theological terms, concepts, and imagery could be translated into their language.

In places where Bible translation is not particularly looked upon with delight, the community cannot work together openly on a translation project. Even so, they can work together on a secure internet collaboration site. Open collaboration with anonymity provides the best of both worlds. In fact, a significant number of the larger unreached people groups that need Bible translations fall within this category. Because of this, more of the cultural and religious insiders are taking on the daunting and sometimes dangerous task of translating for their people. Given their cultural and religious contexts, they have a lot to grapple with and with very little help. Therefore, it would be a shame if people in these situations were not able build their own crowd-sourced translation work on top of existing internet, web, and smart phone platforms for the sake of the Gospel. If they did, I tend to believe that the effect of that translation collaboration would be felt soon after it began. End Notes 1 2 3 4

Gilles Gravelle, PhD. The Seed Company Where Ideas Comes From. WIRED, Oct 2010, p. 122. Here and in other places completed language translations refer to full Bibles or complete New Testaments. According to 2008 statistics, there were nearly 1.6 billion internet users worldwide. Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators. The number of internet users has doubled since about 2003. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 See James Surowiecki. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books, Kindle Edition, chapter 4, location 1250. See end note 5. See endnote 5, chapter 2, location 619. New International Version (NIV), Contemporary English Version (CEV), English Standard Version (ESV). For more on this topic see, Gilles Gravelle. Bible Translation in Historical Context: The Changing Role of Crosscultural Workers. International Journal of Frontier Missiology. 2.71. Spring 2010, 11-20. Steven Voth. Towards an Ethic of Liberation for Bible Translation; Part 1: Ideology," SBL. Forum, n.p. [cited Feb 2008]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=754 Bryan Harmelink, "Ethical Dimensions of Bible Translation Strategies" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the SBL, Atlanta, GA, 23 November 2010), 10. See Paul B. Paulus, et al. 2003. Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration, p. 7. Oxford University Press. See Beth Hennessey. 2004. Is the Social Psychology of Creativity Really Social? Moving Beyond a Focus on the Individual. In Paul B. Paulus, et al. 2003. Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration. Kindle Edition, chapter 9, location 2865. Oxford University Press. See Keith Williams and Leith Gray. The Little Phone That Could: Mobile-Empowered Ministry. International Journal of Frontier Missiology, 27:3 Fall 2010, 139-145. The Design of Design. WIRED, Aug 2010, p. 90.

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See Clay Shirky. 2010. Cognitive Surplus. Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Kindle Edition, chapter 3, location 1173. The Penguin Press, New York. As quoted by Steven Johnson. 2010. Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation. Penguin Group, Kindle Edition, chapter 2, locations 607 and 732. I witnessed this while working as a translation consultant with first-language translators in Timor. By using the Kupang Malay (KM), a local trade language translation as their source text, the translators produced generally better first drafts than many cross-cultural translators do using a multitude of exegetical resources. For one thing, KM, being a contact language, has some similarities with the local languages that influenced it and vice versa. Secondly, it is an important language of intercultural communication, therefore it is widely understood, albeit as a second language for most but not all of the speakers. Thirdly, using the KM translation as a source text resulted in many improvements to the KM translation. That made KM an even better source text for the translators of other languages in the region. See endnote 12, Kindle Edition, chapter 2, location 671. Steven Johnson documents the notion that effective collaboration results in participants becoming smart by virtue of their connection to the collaboration. Then the collaboration becomes smarter as an entity. The NET Bible is the first Bible ever to be beta-tested on the internet. Iterative feedback loops from the broader community are taken into consideration by the people charged with revision decisions. www.bible.org. See Clay Shirky. 2010. Cognitive Surplus. Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The Penguin Press. New York. Faith Comes By Hearing.

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