The Open English Translation
UPDATE: NOW 100% DRAFTED (after an estimated 10,000 hours of work) and starting work on Phase 3 (consistency of formatting, names & key terms, and style).
I've been a bit shy to post on here, but hitting 60% of the OET-RV drafted yesterday [EDIT: that was early-2025], I braved up. So why yet another English translation? Most of the main features are listed on the main website at OET.Bible/Design/ReadersVersion (there's also a parallel Literal Version), but sample text is at Freely-Given.org/OBD/OET/byDoc/MRK.htm#Top.
After some 20+ years with SIL Philippines, we came home to New Zealand in 2010 and got heavily into evangelism, but quickly noticed how I was needing to rephrase my memorized Bible passages to make them not sound weird to people on the street. One thing I noticed first was all the sentences in the Bible starting with the conjunction 'For'.* Since then I've listened carefully, and in four years I haven't heard a single person naturally start a sentence that way [EDIT: now five years and I've heard it twice--once in an older audio book], so I realized that my Bible wasn't translated into MY language. (America could be different???) Then I started noticing more words that I've started listing on the OET discussion pages.
This project came out of a dream some twenty years ago, but I was only in a position to start full-time work on it just over three years ago [EDIT: now four]. Since that time, I've struggled to read a mainstream English Bible without noticing how unnatural the English is (even though years of reading English Bibles had blinded me to that) [ADDITION:] plus I've come to really appreciate and value having 'Yahweh' in my Bible instead of '(the) LORD'. I now regard Bibles like that as deficient: "Praise the name of Yahweh" makes so much more sense! Plus (if you trying asking ordinary church goers), most of the modern generation (at least, here in New Zealand) don't know the difference between 'LORD' in their Bibles and 'Lord'.
All of the development (typos and mistakes and warts and all) is being done in the open (you'll find references to the GitHub repositories on the above sites) and several design decisions are still in flux, but we'd love to have more readers using it and reporting any deficiencies. Or if you're a retired BT consultant and would like to help a project that's designed to be a gift to the world (and especially to those interested in reaching the unreached in our countries), then contact us at the email on our Contact Page as we'd value your contribution. More info on our Partners page.
ADDED FOOTNOTE:
* For God so loved the world that...
*For all have sinned and...
*For the wages of sin is....
Most church attendees, and I've asked many, cannot explain why any of those start with 'For' or what it means or refers to. 'For' has effectively become a meaningless word in English Bibles over the centuries. If they do realise that maybe 'Because' might fit there, then they become confused about what their memorised snippet would then mean as then it starts to feel like only half a sentence. Try testing it on your friends (and do tell me if I'm wrong).
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Thanks for your encouraging comment (and possible offer of help), Iver. On 'gar', yes, 'because' would often be an over-translation, and then perhaps a filler like 'Now' (or even sometimes, 'Yes,') might fit better (which is essentially what meaningless 'For' words do in modern English).
I've never come across an argument about 'Yahweh' like that before and would happily choose to disagree, especially noting that lots of modern people also say 'Lord' without having any life experience of having someone lord it over them, i.e., it's often used very lightly by people who do exactly whatever they want to do. That's why I use 'master' in the OET rather than 'lord' -- just to force people to think. (Of course, being an open translation, anyone can substitute 'LORD' or something for 'Yahweh', rename it from OET, and make their own custom version.)
And by the way, the other expected audience (other than the current unchurched generation when revival hits them) is people like me/us, who've read our Bibles many times over many decades, and who get forced to think more by a new translation that doesn't always say what they expected. If you read the OET Readers' Version and ask yourself "Does it really mean that?", then that's why it's a 2-in-1 with the OET Literal Version right there so the readers can check it themselves in those cases.