A Revolution in Communications Began in Late 2013; Almost No One Knows About It
Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, King James Version, public domain).
This is the crucial economic principle of the division of labor. It is not a new idea. But we find, again and again, that we have overlooked the power of the division of labor in some area of our lives. I'm going to tell you the story of the most astounding example of a man who, single-handedly, or perhaps single-mindedly, came up with a revolutionary breakthrough in the division of labor.
Economists for over two centuries have been familiar with the most famous example in economic literature of the division of labor. It is the first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). He tells the story of the pin makers. A single individual would have to be highly skilled to produce a pin. He could not create many of them in a day. But a group of relatively unskilled individuals who have the right tools can create thousands of pins a day. The price of the pins is low because of this volume. Lots of people can use the pins. The division of labor is what makes the difference.
The other famous example is Henry Ford's production line for the Model T. He took the idea from the conveyor belts used by Sears and Roebuck. He modified the concept and created a mass-production revolution. But he didn't do it all by himself. He got the basic idea from somebody else.
This is the story of a man who, in one flash of insight, revolutionized an ancient technique that had not fundamentally changed in the history of man. I suppose there are other examples of people who did something like this, but this is the first time I have ever heard about anyone who revolutionized this old a practice. He did it by completely rethinking the nature of the production process.
I'm speaking here of the laborious process known as the translation of documents. We have come to a time, unique in human history, when digital translations are possible. This has taken place in just the last few years. It does not constitute a revolution, but it is a revolution in this sense, and we get a Pareto-like distribution of accuracy. Documents translated by a computer from a major language to another major language are usually readable. There are lots of errors. There are confused sentences. If you take a translation from English to French, and then take the French translation and translate it back to English, you would see how bad the process really is. But it is better than nothing. With artificial intelligence, it will get better.
But always in translation, there is an element of judgment. The judgment has to do with the subtlety of language. In a very real sense, it is artistic judgment. There are rules of grammar, but we don't learn the language by following rules of grammar. We learn a language by speaking it. This is why high school courses in a foreign language do not teach people how to speak it. The best essay I've ever read on this was written by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. I posted it on my website months ago: https://www.garynorth.com/public/17671.cfm.
One mark of someone who really knows a foreign language is dreaming in the language. Another mark is the ability to understand a funny story in a foreign language. If somebody makes a funny comment, he understands that language.
Not many people are bilingual. Among those who are, a small percentage really have mastery of both languages. These people are hired to do translations of documents and books. They are not highly paid, but they make a steady income.
FOREIGN MISSIONS
One area in which the ability to speak a foreign language is crucial is the work of foreign missions. Missionaries have to learn a language. If they are trying to evangelize a group that has never heard the gospel, they're going to have to translate the Bible into that language. There is an old rule governing this process: "one missionary, one translator, one lifetime." It has been a major problem for foreign missions among tribes and linguistic groups that are illiterate.
Probably the most effective Protestant organization in the world is Wycliffe Bible Translators. They train young men and women to go into an isolated culture, learn the language well enough to communicate, develop an alphabet for the language, write down the grammatical rules of the language, and then translate the New Testament into that language. If they have enough time, they're supposed to translate the Old Testament, too, but they always start with the New Testament. The organization is so good at training these people that they are sometimes invited into Muslim countries. There is a quid pro quo. They have to produce a grammar for the language. They send it to the government. The government doesn't know how to issue rules and regulations in a form that the tribe can understand. So, the government is willing to let the Christian missionaries in on the basis that the missionaries will create a literate society that the government can more easily regulate.
It takes years for a missionary to do this. Even a husband-and-wife team will take a long time to do this. It will help if they have young children who will learn the language from other children. Their children will speak the language better than they do.
What I did not know until Saturday evening, July 28, is that there is another organization involved in translation: Wycliffe Associates. For years, this organization did not do much translating. It built facilities in isolated cultures. It flew people from place to place in isolated areas. It was formed in 1967.
I was speaking on the telephone with a friend of mine who had been invited to an evening dinner by the organization. This is the way that the organization gets its story out to people who might make fairly large donations. It's a perfectly legitimate way of raising money. Lots of organizations do this. The advantage this organization now has is that it has a story to tell which, five years ago, could not have been told because nothing like it has ever existed. The organization has found a way to translate the Bible or any book for a culture that is illiterate.
One man developed this technique initially. I don't imagine many people have ever heard his name: Dan Kramer. He taught English as a second language (ESL) at Wayne State University. He also taught ESL at a middle school. On vacation, he and his wife visited the Bible Translation Discovery Center in Orlando. He learned about problems in translating the Bible. Later, a person from Wycliffe Associates called him and invited him to get involved. Five years later in 2013 he was invited to be part of a translation operation in a South Asian nation. The book that tells the story does not mention its name. It is referred to as the High Mountains. The risk to local participants still is great. Their lives are at risk. He was invited to help the translators better understand English. The organization calls this English Language Learning.
Before they departed, he had attended a training workshop in Orlando. A bi-lingual native asked him this: "Could you use ELL training methods to help us improve Bible translation?" He thought about this. He learned that they checked the translation six months later. This seemed too long to him. But this was considered fast. As an outsider, he did not know this. Overnight, he came up with a better way.
The world had been waiting for this for several millennia.
He presented it to the native, who said it was what they needed. It is a group program -- the division of labor. Here is the program:
1. Read the Bible chapter in a related language.
2. Discuss the chapter in your own language.
3. Divide the chapter into small portions of a few verses (chunks).
4. Close the Bible and translate from memory (blind draft).
5. Individually check the translation against the source (self-check).
6. The group checks each person's translation (peer check).
7. Check keywords for theological consistency.
8. Verse-by-verse check in context
Nothing special here, right?
Wrong.
In the High Mountains center, four teams met for a practice run. Each team had two people. Each member was bi-lingual: English and a local language. There were four languages. Kramer taught them this technique for two weeks. Then their work began on a Monday. The first day was tough. It got easier on Tuesday. By Wednesday, they were speeding up. Then things took an unexpected turn.
On Thursday morning, two men showed up. They had heard about the project. They had walked for two days. They were not translators, but they were bilingual. They were from a language group of only 30,000 speakers. Kramer did not send them home. He invited them to translate I Thessalonians 1. They worked all day. They completed it. Their translation was accurate.
But wait! They had received no training. What was going on?
The two men went back to their tribe to recruit more volunteer first-time translators. They recruited 13. They returned for another session. In a two-week period, this group translated half of the New Testament. Within a year, they had translated the rest of the New Testament. Then they began translating the Old Testament.
THE REVOLUTION
This was a revolution. It was due to the high output of the division of labor. Nothing like this had ever been done before by untrained people. The organization began to perfect the technique. They held other meetings in Third World countries. Burma/Myanmar was one location. There, a team of 26 people translated the entire New Testament in two weeks. It became clear that the process works consistently. The amount of training time needed to train a group to begin a successful translation is less than one day. There is sometimes initially some resistance to the methodology, but by the second day, the group is merrily translating. It is translating at speeds never seen before.
Even better, the organization brought in experts in the domestic languages who also were Bible translation experts. They verified that the quality of the translations and the accuracy of the translations was as good as anything available in the more widely spoken regional languages. The translation sounded like the language of the people. It did not sound like something written by a Western missionary who did the translation. This is a tremendous breakthrough.
Furthermore, churches participated in the process. They cooperated with each other if there was more than one congregation or denomination that spoke a language. Every group wanted to get a Bible for its own use. The churches saw that they have a stake in the process. They were the translators.
Next, the organization found that the methodology works with illiterate cultures. They can do this with inexpensive recording technology and software developed by Wycliffe Associates. They can put together an audio Bible that sounds like the language of the people. The digital files can be used with a simple computer or smartphone to play the Bible at church meetings back home.
It gets better. Wycliffe Associates made an update of the 1901 American Standard Version of the Bible. The ASV mimicked the language of the King James. It sounded archaic. I remember it. I used to read it 55 years ago. I didn’t read it often. It was easier to read the King James. Here is why it is important. Its copyright ran out years ago. So, Wycliffe Associates made a revised version and put into the public domain under Creative Commons. This way, any linguistic group can use this as the English language Bible to translate into the indigenous language. It can also be used by churches that speak a more popular regional language. This is important because the language can be made much more modern than some of the Bible translations that are available in these relatively common languages. Furthermore, because there is no copyright involved, nobody has to pay any royalties to a book publisher. The story is here. The Bible is here.
It gets better. One young man who got involved is a Russian. He is something of a computer geek. He is also an entrepreneur. He got involved early in 2017. He developed software that enables group translation over the Internet. A group of half a dozen people can translate the Bible into an indigenous language. He placed that software into the public domain through Creative Commons. It can be used without the expense of having to fly Americans to those Third World countries that have the Internet.
There is a free book on all this. You can download it here.
HOW THIS HAS CHANGED MY PLANS
I finished reading the book on Sunday afternoon, I called my friend again. I told him how much I liked the book. I told him about this computerized group translation program.
Then the light went on again. I realized that it would be possible for a group to take any of my books, which I have already authorized people to use free of charge on the web, to translate them into a particular indigenous language. This includes a 31-volume economic commentary on the Bible. Admittedly, this commentary was written for people with scholarly concerns, which is clearly not the case with some indigenous group . . . yet. But they don’t have to translate the footnotes. They can skip over the references to von Mises or Kant or Darwin.
I have another contact who has translated volume 1 of Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law into Bulgarian. He is a highly skilled translator. I sent him an email with a link to the book. I directed him to look at chapter 11. I told him that it would now be possible for a few energetic associates in Bulgaria to translate all of my materials into Bulgarian. This project could be used as a model for group translators in other countries. Bulgaria has excellent Internet service. It’s probably better than the Internet service in the United States. I’ll see if he takes the bait, but I suspect that he will. If he doesn’t, I’ll make a donation to his ministry to hire some translators part-time. But I think I won’t have to do this.
CONCLUSION
The key to this for a non-profit movement is bi-lingual volunteers who are dedicated to spreading the movement's worldview. This cooperative translation technique increases their output fantastically.
It is clear why church members have this degree of commitment, especially in societies in which they are persecuted. Not many causes gain this kind of follower. These people are disciples.
I can imagine that a nonprofit organization such as the Mises Institute would be able to tap into an international network of bi-lingual disciples. They could translate the works of Mises and Rothbard. I can think of no other school of economic thought that would have this degree of commitment by readers. The readers are not academics. They are true believers. They are not being paid to hold such views. Marxists were like this until the 1970's. Then the burning commitment faded.