Information and the Future

This is the blog of the Information and the Future task force of the Rolfing Library at Trinity International University. The IF task force exists to explore the role of libraries in the future of Christian higher education.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Wiki Bible

On Moody radio this morning they were talking about a wikipedia translation of the Bible, where anyone can contribute to a new translation. The speakers were of course concerned about this; you wouldn't be able to tell the translators' expertise or their perspective which might affect their translation.

I did a google search trying to find out more about it. I didn't find a wikipedia Bible translation, but I did find BibleWiki, which is a wikipedia Bible commentary. That would be open to the same criticisms.

On an interesting side note, I found a wiki that is translating the Bible into LOLspeak. I think it's like the shorthand used for IM, but another characteristic seems to be that almost everything is misspelled. Sigh - what is happening to young people these days? :)

2 Comments:

  • At 1:50 PM, Blogger Cindee said…

    Re: LOLspeak -- unless I'm mistaken, this started with (or at least is strongly connected to) a humor site where people post photos of animals with captions. The captions are deliberately misspelled to suggest that if animals could write, they'd probably not spell correctly.

    It's a funny site (and a very popular one) but the humor comes as much from the captions and misspellings as anything, and as such, is only really funny to those who know how the words should be spelled:

    http://icanhascheezburger.com/

    The cats are often referred to as 'lolcats.'

    A lot of the misspellings are phonetic and thus similar to common text spellings. The risk, of course, is that the site will make it harder for people to recognize misspellings when they see them. It's a funny site, though.

     
  • At 10:15 AM, Blogger Blake Walter said…

    The Wiki Bible Wikiproject is the site for the wiki translation project:

    http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:WPWB

    Call me Jeremiah, but it seems a misguided effort to me that ignores the historical difficulties of Bible translation and the need for a translation team that not only has the appropriate expertise but a common commitment to God's word apt to be lacking in a wiki project.

     

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