Oral communication is radical because any communication in the oral media is very different from the communication in the print media.
Oral media
- The short term and final goal is to communicate God’s message.
- The focus is on the audience, how they learn and how they respond to information.
- The focus is also on facilitating the listeners changing their worldview to the Christian worldview.
- The method is to communicate the concepts in a way that a living person speaks to another person. This facilitates a learner presenting the message to others, person to person, with minimal special training.
- Everyone should recognize that people accept new information as valid only when they hear it from a credible person.
- The procedure presents learnable chunks of information in an incremental sequence, because we recognize that people learn by increments.
Print media
- The short term is to distribute the encrypted message to deeply interested people (less than 10% of any population). The long term is to present a standard of faith that is trustworthy.
- The focus is on protecting the message so that it can be trusted as unchangeable, from generation to generation.
- The method is to present a book that people will honor.
- The procedure is to print books and distribute them to whoever is interested.
- Even when we produce audio recordings of a printed text, we expect that the users will listen to the recordings as if they were hearing someone read the text. (However, we are likely to be mistaken if we assume a consistent strong interest in the content.)
Oral communication is radical because the translation process is different from the process for drafting texts.
Accuracy in oral translation
- The translator hears an audio recording of a meaningful accurate version in the Language of Wider Communication.
- In such a version, most of the abstract concepts and ambiguous issues are explicated.
- The team carefully minimizes some concepts that are not important to the message or leave them implicit until the recording of the whole documents.
- They make “native” the foreign names or communicate them in a general way.
- Some accuracy is tested in community checks and a different person back-translating the audio recording.
- More accuracy is verified by an experienced consultant reviewing the back-translation and discussing issues with the team.
Accuracy in printed translation
- The print translator is trained in principles of communicating in writing and translating in print.
- He or she bases the translation on several printed texts and as many exegetical helps that are usable to him or her.
- Some accuracy is tested in community checks and a different person back-translating the text.
- More accuracy is verified by an experienced consultant reviewing the back-translation and discussing issues with the team.
This style training is radical also because we facilitate translators in their learning to communicate an oral message instead of training them to create documents.
Facilitating exploration sessions
- We suggest that new teams present to their audiences selected passages that focus on a topic. The selections are short, germane to the audience and appropriate for oral learners.
- We suggest to the teams that they introduce the passage with a personal comment or recommendation, so that the listeners are able to recognize that the new information is coming from a valid member of their community.
- We suggest that the teams finish each session with a provocative message that challenges the listeners to learn more or to make a decision about the concepts they have heard.
- We further recommend that the listeners talk to someone about the concepts they have heard. (The process of talking to another person deepens the talker’s understanding of the concepts and it likely will pique the other person’s curiosity about the message.
Training in workshops
- Workshops generally focus on the exegesis of a given document of the New or Old Testament.
- Workshops facilitate the teams in their attempts to communicate the meaning of the sentences and paragraphs of the document in focus.
- Most workshops are based on a schedule of lectures. There is generally an expectation that the lectures will enlighten the translators about the whole text of the document in focus.
- There is an expectation that the teams will complete their translation of the document in focus, and that they will complete it before beginning to translate another document.
Our facilitation of translators is radical also because it is constructive instead of instructive.
We expect to encourage teams to experiment:
- In their finding the ways to record on a handheld recorder/player,
- In recognizing the techniques of communication through voice modulation and stress,
- In recognizing the differences of effectiveness from using or not using idioms and
- In their talking together about what they are learning.
The facilitator anticipates, as much as possible, the learners’ conceptions about translating and communicating, and attempts to guide the activities toward the desired conceptions, helping the learners to increment their abilities.
Our facilitation of translators must be radical also because we want the teams we facilitate to be able to replicate their facilitation in others.
We expect the team that we facilitate will deepen their own abilities by their facilitating others to learn some of the skills they have learned by guided discovery. Not only do we anticipate the teams facilitating others, we expect that the oral translations that they develop will be readily usable by the people who hear them, not only for personal use but also for talking with others.
Since the oral communication of God’s message is so radical, we ought to use a different set of jargon to talk about the concepts when we train oral translators.
We are literates who are fomenting the process of oral translation. We have all been raised the printed-translation culture and we continue to live in the literate culture. We come from different parts of the physical world and we have different levels of expertise in the printed translation world. As we develop a new thing, would it not be well that we all learn a new jargon? It would be a kind of equalizer. Not only that, if our jargon is descriptive, it will be easier to transfer into any Language of Wider Communication. It will then be easier for the teams whom we facilitate to communicate the concepts in their languages to their people. (See “Descriptive ways for referring to the way people talk” at
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3fz3KyACuZrZGhsMEk3ajFNREU/view?usp=sharing)
Review your attitude toward communicating the Scriptures orally, in audio recordings:
- IF YOU STILL CONSIDER THAT PRINT AND DIGITAL TEXT ARE THE ONLY LEGITIMATE OR FEASIBLE WAYS FOR COMMUNICATING THE SCRIPTURES, you should should not spend more time reading. Any of the other articles will not convince you.
- If you have recognized some value in communicating the Scriptures orally (audio recordings), BUT IF YOU ARE NOT YET CONVINCED that oral translation is feasible, you should reread this article.
If you are convinced that oral translation is legitimate, feasible and urgent, you may proceed to:
A strategy for presenting audio Scripture
