Translation Insights

00:00
Jost Zetzsche
The church is not centered in any place, but it’s centered in the hearts of people everywhere, essentially, no matter the language, no matter the culture, no matter the ethnic belonging, that I think is a really powerful message. 

00:22
Rich Rudowske
You welcome to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. I’m Richardesky. 

00:28
Emily Wilson
And I’m Emily Wilson. 

00:29
Rich Rudowske
I’m really excited about today’s episode because we are talking with Yost Zetche, who I met several years ago, and he’s been working on a project that tries to bridge the gap between all the stuff that’s going on in Bible translation and the stuff we can learn about the Bible as it’s translated into new languages and to put it in a space where anybody who goes to the site and wants to look for it can access it. And so it’s been a dream of mine that something like that would exist. And as Lutheran Bible translators, we’re going to be excited to partner with Yoast and to continue to make known this tool available to God’s people in the church. 

01:05
Emily Wilson
But I was going to say, have you subscribed yet to Lutheran Bible translators? Essentially translatable podcast? That’s one of the things that we would love for you guys to do, is to not miss an episode. So, rich, how can they do that? 

01:21
Rich Rudowske
Well, Emily, I’m glad you asked. You can subscribe from any podcast platform if you’re listening to us on audible or Apple podcasts, which a lot of folks go there. Spotify is a very popular spot, even iHeartRadio, Amazon music, wherever you’re at and wherever you’re finding us, there is a way to subscribe there. And so that’s a simple process. You should just find that button, hit subscribe, then whenever a new episode is released, you’re going to be alerted. It’s going to show up in your queue. And we are every other week on Friday mornings. Or you can find every episode at Lutheran Bible translators website, lbt.org slash podcast. And there’s a way to subscribe from there, too. 

01:59
Emily Wilson
So can you tell us a little bit more about Yost’s background? 

02:02
Jost Zetzsche
Sure. 

02:02
Rich Rudowske
Yost is a pastor out in Oregon and grew up in Germany. He’ll talk some about that in the interview and his studies and chinese studies particularly. So. A linguist by trade, he’s published several books on language and translation. He’s been contracting with the United Bible societies to help and create and curate a tool called translation insights and perspectives. He’s been contracting with united Bible societies to help create and curate translation insights and perspectives. He also published his most recent book, Encountering Bare Bones Christianity, for the last few years, and he says he did that to help himself and others explain in easy to understand, everyday language that Christianity holds unique possibilities and advantages. That sounds really interesting. 

02:43
Rich Rudowske
We’ll have to have him on another time to talk about that, but for today, let’s enjoy this interview with Jost Zeche talking about translation, insights and perspectives. All right, we are glad to welcome this morning Jost Zeche to the podcast. Welcome, Jost. 

03:02
Jost Zetzsche
Thank you so much for having me. 

03:03
Emily Wilson
We’re happy to have you with us. So we want to always introduce our guests to our listeners. Maybe people have met you in person, especially in the Bible translation world, but for those who haven’t, can you share a little bit about yourself and your background and what got you into the Bible translation sphere? 

03:23
Jost Zetzsche
Sure. So, as rich said, my name is Jost Seche, and as you might be able to hear from my accent, I’m German. I live in the United States. I’ve been living here for 25 years or so, and I grew up in Germany. And then I started to study chinese studies or synology, and lived in China for a few years as part of my studies program and became a Christian in China. I had been baptized and confirmed in the german lutheran church, but it was not a faith thing. I was not a believing Christian, but I became a Christian in China and became really interested in the Christian Bible and ended up studying the Christian Bible and wrote both my master’s and PhD thesis on the history and a linguistic comparison of the Chinese Bible. And that sort of is my intro into Bible translation. 

04:13
Jost Zetzsche
I then moved to the United States and actually became a technical translator, nothing to do with Bible translation at all. And just about ten years ago or so, I picked up Bible translation again and had this idea for this project that we are talking about today and was able to combine my experience as a translator and my background doing research on Bible translation in China into this project. I always tell people when you turn 50, that’s like the best time of your life because that’s kind of when you look back at all the things you’ve done, you’re able to combine all those things that you have done into something truly unique. And it kind of felt like that for me. 

04:56
Emily Wilson
That’s awesome. 

04:57
Rich Rudowske
I love it. Yeah, I’m turning 50 next year, so I’ll keep that in mind. 

05:00
Jost Zetzsche
It’s going to be the best time of your life. 

05:02
Rich Rudowske
All right, I’m looking forward to it. 

05:04
Emily Wilson
So I have not met you in person. Jost but rich, you have had the opportunity to meet together, and so what is the environment where you guys are all coming together? Just because I think a lot of our listeners are like, when do Bible translation people get together and actually talk about the work that’s happening? 

05:24
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, there’s a lot of collaborative spaces in the Bible translation movement and United Bible societies and Lutheran Bible translators have had different collaborative efforts over the years in the form of Bible agencies international as a space where we’ll overlap quite a bit. And then in the illuminations, every tribe, every nation alliance. And so those kind of networking pieces are where we’ve been able to get together. For Lutheran Bible translators, we’ve had an affinity to the United Bible societies and the local and national Bible society projects where a number of the places where we are working through missionary or granted programs, the partner on the ground is the Bible Society in that country. And then were really pleased earlier this year to sign a memo of understanding with the United Bible societies to share translation consultancy. 

06:15
Rich Rudowske
And basically, Lutheran Bible translators recognize translation consultants and UBS recognized translation consultants are essentially interchangeable under that MoU so that we can help each other out with backlogs and things like that. So in that spirit, I think Yoast had contacted us along with others just to make us aware of the tips tool that we’re going to talk about here. 

06:37
Rich Rudowske
And I’m super busy, so it kind of sat in the mailbox for quite a long time, but then it came back up at some point, and I realized, I took a look at it, what it was, and I was excited about it, because when I was a brand new pastor and missionary with Lutheran Bible translators, when I would visit churches in the United States, I would say to pastors, one of the things I think that Lutheran Bible translators or the Bible translation movement could really do and should be doing is have a structured way to tell you what is happening around the world as people interact with God’s word in their languages, and things that come to light and things that come out of the text that you don’t normally see in the US environment that most of our listeners are from. 

07:22
Rich Rudowske
And that’s a real tall order, how to coordinate all of that. And what I saw in the tips tool was something that’s like, wow, this could be that thing. And so yoast at that point was then saying, hey, we’d love Lutheran Bible translators to be a little more directly involved in some of the oversight of the project. And so we reconnected, and that’s how we got here. 

07:42
Emily Wilson
That’s awesome. 

07:43
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. 

07:44
Emily Wilson
So thank you for that. 

07:47
Jost Zetzsche
You know, I do think know the different groups that are working in Bible translation often have different theological backgrounds, maybe, or cultural backgrounds even. But there is a strong, like you say, rich. There is a strong cooperation. Also, there is a number of digital spaces, discussion groups or forums where there’s a very rich exchange of ideas, and I’m certainly part of those, as you are, as most Bible translators are. And it’s something to be really appreciated. So it felt very natural to reach out to organizations like Lutheran Bible translators or pioneer Bible translators or others to invite them to be part of this project. And we’ll talk about the project in a second, because the project benefits from everyone’s efforts and combines everyone’s efforts into the space that we’re building there. 

08:40
Emily Wilson
Yeah. So can you share a little bit about the tips tool? We’ve kind of alluded a little bit, but what is the project? And what was the origin story of the culmination of the project? 

08:50
Jost Zetzsche
Thank you. So tips stands for translation insights and perspectives. And the tool is essentially a very large database that collects remarkable translations from any language in which we can find remarkable translations and makes them accessible for free for everybody online. And what I mean by remarkable translations are translations that somehow broadens our perspective on the biblical text. They’re not supposed to change our perspective on biblical text, but as people who work with languages, we know that languages are unique in the truest sense of the word. Every language is unique, is only there one time, and is different from any other language. And with that uniqueness comes differences of expression and of ways to approach concepts with language. 

09:45
Jost Zetzsche
So what we’re doing is if we have access to that data, we are listing and collecting those different approaches to concepts, to grammatical concepts, to words, to phrases, to whole verses, and hope to enrich the regular church attendee, or the pastor, or of course, the Bible translator who works on other Bible translation with those what we call insights. And this is a project that is sponsored by United Bible societies, and I’ve started working on it about five years ago. I’m spending about between a third and a half of my time working on this, and it’s become truly huge. It’s a huge project at this point. I have a programmer who helps me create the interface and the many access points to the data. 

10:39
Jost Zetzsche
And the data now consists of 800 some languages and 25,000 individual insights concerning more than two thirds of the verses of the Bible. And it’s really big. And the idea really is, like I said, twofold one for the Bible translator who looks for ways to either coin or find terms in a new language that the Bible is being translated into by getting inspiration from what we’ve done, what we’ve collected in the tool. But also for the Christian who does his morning devotions or evening devotions or whatever, and struggles with a certain verse that he or she cannot quite get a handle on, looks into our tool and will find some data, especially if it’s the New Testament. 

11:33
Jost Zetzsche
We have more data for the New Testament than for the Old Testament or the deuterocanonicals, but they will find data in the New Testament and might just get kind of that breakthrough and understanding, or that enrichment of understanding for the verse or the term or the concept that they’ve been struggling with, or for the pastor who prepares a Sunday sermon and wants to find illustrations. It’s such a rich tool to find those illustrations via other languages that may not be, in this case, Greek or Hebrew, but are often quoted, of course, as the original languages, and for good reason. But we believe that the Bible is fully translatable. We have to believe that as people engaged with Bible translation. 

12:24
Jost Zetzsche
And if it’s fully translatable, then it means that there is richness in the way that other languages are translating, which in turn, then means that we, if it’s back translated into English as english speakers, can gain insights from that and can gain wealth and wisdom in our understanding of the text that we’re dealing with. 

12:45
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And that’s going to have to do with the language and culture will all have a different perspective or certain things that are more in view from their frame of reference. Right. That’s part of what makes the information so rich that there’s a number of the languages that are represented in this database that in many ways are closer to the original biblical context. So they’re seeing things that we don’t see, or they’re wrestling with different issues that have come into the language for the first time, right? 

13:14
Jost Zetzsche
That’s correct, yeah, absolutely. So often languages have one specific word for concept, that English or maybe even Greek and Hebrew will have to have a whole sentence to explain that. Especially languages who are maybe closer to the Middle eastern culture, where the Bible was written, but also languages from around the globe have just very practical ways of describing the biblical text. And also, what fascinates me so much is that Hebrew and Greek clearly are fully capable, Aramaic are fully capable of communicating the message of the Bible, and so is English, as we believe. But there’s often cases where languages and languages we might never have heard of because they’re only spoken by a couple of thousand speakers, or even less so have ways to use language that actually makes us look much more closely at the greek or hebrew text. 

14:23
Jost Zetzsche
So an example that I like to share is that for the first personal plural pronoun, we in English or in Greek or in Hebrew, we is very. When the three of us are talking right now, and if I talk to rich and say we, it’s not quite clear who I mean, are you included in that? We rich or are you not included? That’s a differentiation that many languages make. Greek doesn’t make that differentiation. Hebrew doesn’t make that differentiation, but those languages do. So what they have to do is look at the text of the Bible and actually understand something that is not immediately communicated in the text of the Bible. So they have to look just a little bit deeper into the text to understand what’s actually happening there, so that they are forced to use that inclusive or exclusive. 

15:15
Jost Zetzsche
We therefore have to shed more light on the text, and that enriches us in the process. When Peter says to Jesus, doing the transfiguration, Lord, it is good for us to be here. What’s he actually saying? Who’s he talking about? Does he include Jesus? Or is he just talking about him and John? And so those are beautiful examples, I think, where we can learn through other languages. 

15:44
Emily Wilson
I love that word enrichment and learning from other language communities. And very often we talk about God’s word as like a diamond, that as you’re turning it and having different facets highlighted and just kind of new revelations as well, that just the whole body of Christ is enriched by what these translations are saying and how they’re communicating, thinking from a new perspective as member of the body of Christ. So you’ve got a lot of different language communities coming together, people who are submitting their translations, their back translations. Can you share a little bit about what that process is like? You were saying that you have a programmer, which props to that person because it is a beautiful website to interact with. It’s very streamlined and clean. So can you share a little bit about the behind the scenes process? 

16:41
Jost Zetzsche
Thank you. And I will pass those kudos on to my programmer, who’s actually sick right now, but once he’s getting better, I’ll let him know that he liked the website. So the process, there’s essentially two different kinds of processes. One is that I go through publications, that there are a number of journals, many books have been written about Bible translation, and I comb through those and find data in those. And then, especially if they are from the try to verify, then, whether the translations that the translation consultants or translators talk about in those publications actually have made it into the Bible, which is often available through Bible.com, for instance, or other sources that the public might not have access to. 

17:30
Jost Zetzsche
But bible.com has hundreds and hundreds of languages available, and you can often then verify whether the translations that they talk about in those publications have indeed made it into the final Bible. And the other way is that I talk with translators and translation consultants and, for instance, really encourage them to share their notes with me. Their notes are a feature in paritext. Paratext is the tool that virtually all translation teams use to translate the Bible because it gives them access to, obviously, the greek and Hebrew text, many other tools, but it also gives them a way to cooperate very closely. And in that collaborative or cooperative effort, they exchange data, they exchange nodes, and it’s often those nodes that have many of those little diamonds of information that we find really interesting for our tool. 

18:30
Jost Zetzsche
And then while I’m the main curator of the tool, there’s also a board that we have that helps me to make decisions on insights, whether they’re valuable to include or whether they might not be wise to include, or whether they might be too sensitive to include. There’s, for instance, Bible translation happening in areas of the world where, if it’s currently happening, where the translator might not be too happy about that being made public. And so this board consists of four UBS translation consultants, a person from pioneer Bible translators, from Wycliffe, from Sil, from seed, and with Chris Pluger, also somebody from Lutheran Bible translators. 

19:19
Jost Zetzsche
And the board, even though they actually don’t spend many hours working on it, is really valuable to me because, as I mentioned earlier, I do have a background in Bible translation, but I didn’t grow up within all the Bible translation associations. So for me, it’s really helpful to have that sort of feedback and the assurance that I’m not going astray here in what I’m doing. And so that’s a very valuable part of our work. The way that we record the data is kind of in an unjudgmental sort of way. We don’t evaluate, we don’t say, well, this is not a good translation, or this is a great translation. We just record the data that we are being given, that we’re being given access to, or that we find in publications, and let the user of a tool then decide whether it’s helpful or not. 

20:14
Jost Zetzsche
Clearly, if it’s translations that are very similar to english translations or other translations that are easily accessible, we wouldn’t record them because it doesn’t make much sense for us to record them. But if they are different from the way that, for instance, English approaches the biblical text, or richer than the way that English approaches a text, then we will just record them. 

20:38
Rich Rudowske
So there may be several people listening to this podcast episode who currently work in Bible translation or have in the past, and they may think, oh man, I’ve got something that would be useful to submit to a tool like this. How would they go about doing that? 

20:53
Jost Zetzsche
Thank you. That’s really easy to do. Our website address is tips translation Bible. So tips translation Bible and there are two ways to submit data. You can either submit data in addition to an existing entry. So every entry that you find will have a field that allows you to record additional data or corrections or amendments. Or there’s also a link on the very top of the page that says submit an insight where you can just click on that and submit data that you might have and anything is valuable. So please submit your data if you have some. If you want to give us access to your notes in paritext or maybe more than just one single insight, we would be very pleased about that also. 

21:44
Rich Rudowske
That’s great. I’m actually getting ready to submit something myself. I just had to do some work to verify some neighboring language information, which is part of the insight there, and make sure that I had all those facts correct. So I’m actually looking forward to sending something in myself soon as well. 

22:01
Jost Zetzsche
That’s great. And maybe I can add one more thing, rich. So we also respect whether the person who submits the data wants to be mentioned or not. If the person of the data that’s been submitted does not want to be mentioned, that’s just fine with us. And we just say anonymous. If of course you do want to be mentioned, then we’ll mention your name. 

22:22
Rich Rudowske
Sure. So for just anybody who might want to use the tool when they go to tips translation Bible, just give us a little bit of description of what they’re going to find when they get there. 

22:33
Jost Zetzsche
Sure. So like I said, we’ve been working on that for five years and we’ve gone through many ways to present our data and we finally decided to make it as easy as possible. In the website that we have right now. There’s still lots of ways to access the data, but we really encourage people to use two ways of doing it. If you come to our website, you’ll see two text boxes and the first text box is for a verse search, and the other text box is for a term search and the verse search, you can obviously enter a verse in the Bible. And what you will get when you do that, you will get the Greek and an english reference translation. 

23:14
Jost Zetzsche
So the greek original text, english reference translation, and then on the right hand side of the screen you will see sometimes just one, sometimes a dozen, sometimes more than 20 different stories or insights that all relate to the text of that verse. And all of the stories are richly hyperlinked. So each of the language names, for instance, provides a hyperlink to a link in Wikipedia where you can learn about that language, how many people are speaking it, where it is spoken, because very often you’ll find out that you will have never heard those language names. They are clearly with also language names like French, German, Greek and whatever Spanish. But the majority of languages are very small languages and even the most ardent linguists will not know all those languages. So it’s important for us to give some background information to the languages. 

24:03
Jost Zetzsche
Also, under the language link, you then will find a link to an online version of the Bible, if it actually exists. Typically it does exist. Sometimes it doesn’t. Not for you to necessarily read it, because likely you won’t be able to read it, but just kind of to give you a sense that this is real, there actually is a Bible translation. We’re not making these things up. Or you can also on the homepage look for term. 

24:29
Jost Zetzsche
And the term search is kind of nice because we use a technology by which as you type in the term or phrase you’re looking for, the database is being searched and you see a lot of suggestions that contain that term, whether it’s maybe a whole verse translation that contains that term, or a discussion of a specific word that actually is that term or contains that term, then they will be shown to you and you can click on them and read the stories about what you’re looking for. Typically, our experience is that people, especially people within the church, want to use the verse search because they are reading the Bible, want to learn more about it, have something in whatever, Matthew 27 four, Matthew 23 four, and type that in and we’ll find information about that. But both ways are possible. 

25:29
Jost Zetzsche
You can also, like I said, if you click around, you’ll find also other ways to search for data. But we found that by limiting the easy access to just two ways and the two ways that are the most prominent ones, the tool just becomes easier to use. You can also see if you go down on the homepage links to currently updated or added insights. You can see some multimedia articles that we have in the tool. You can also at the very bottom of the page, and that might be interesting, find a little tutorial that gives you some information on how to use the tool. If people prefer that’s amazing. 

26:11
Emily Wilson
There’s just a lot of layers to be able to interact with, tips, and I’m sure that you’ve heard a variety of people not only coming to the tool, but then being able to share it and apply it. So what is it that you have noticed not only in the Bible translation world? I know you kind of mentioned a little bit about pastors maybe sharing in sermons or the like, but what is it that’s really stood out to you for the utilizing of this tool in the realm of ministry? 

26:43
Jost Zetzsche
And this might sound strange to you, but I think that the tool sort of is kind of a step towards, if you will, democraticization. Is that right word? Making scripture more, not democratic, but making scripture more available to all. I personally have a hard time sometimes, and I know that pastors who will listen to this will disagree with that, but I have a hard time sometimes when the pastor from the pulpit says, so. This is what it says in such and such a verse. But let me tell you what it really says, because I speak Greek or I read Hebrew, and I have a much deeper insight than that than you parishioners do. I think that’s really detrimental sometimes, because while it might actually be sort of true, it also communicates that the Bible is really not accessible to all in an equal way. 

27:40
Jost Zetzsche
What I hope to do with the tool is to sort of take that position of deeper insight for this one little group away and give it to all so everybody can go and find that data and not have the one person who might have knowledge in Greek and Hebrew, and often that knowledge in Greek and Hebrew might not be that great. He might have just looked in a dictionary to find what way he found to give us illustrations for his sermons, for her sermons. I would love for that to be sort of more widely distributed, and I think that’s part of what we’re doing with that tool, what we have recently done. And if you just click around a little bit, you’ll see that. And I really like that, is that we have started to make the data that we have visually available also. 

28:35
Jost Zetzsche
At least we’re starting to do that. So for the larger stories, you’ll find that. So let me explain. And sometimes you have concepts that are complex and have many different ways of approaching it. So let’s say you have forgiveness, the concept of forgiveness. Clearly all languages have to deal with that because it’s so central to the christian message. And amazingly enough, languages have beautifully rich and different ways of dealing with forgiveness, of expressing in their language what forgiveness is. And so we end up having these long lists of the different languages, how they express forgiveness. And these lists sometimes can be 20, 30, 40 languages long, which is a lot of work to kind of wait through and read through all of that, especially if you then want to find out where that language is spoken and on, so on and so forth. 

29:30
Jost Zetzsche
So for those cases we now offer, if you go to that inside, right underneath the title, you find a little link that says view graphically. You can click on that and you will sort of step into a term cloud, if you will, where you see the Greek and Hebrew and English reference in the middle, and then all around it are grouped the different translations doesn’t actually say from which language. It just gives you an impression how other languages approach this concept and how different it can be and enriches you immediately. If you then want to find more details, then you can go back to the story and actually find out which language does what, et cetera, or do some more research. Often we have more detailed stories than connected with these translations. 

30:25
Jost Zetzsche
We are kind of caught between wanting to communicate really rich data to linguists, Bible translators that want to have all the data possible that they can possibly process for their own work. At the same time, we also want to communicate to people who are not interested in all that super detailed data. They just want to have an impression how a concept or word or whatever is translated by a certain language without all that surrounding data. So we are trying to kind of fit our tool to both audiences and don’t make compromises per se, but make both paths available, hope to make both paths available to the different groups that use that tool. 

31:08
Rich Rudowske
I love that, especially that word cloud idea. That would be a really powerful image to see for core concepts like forgiveness and peace and love and things like that. I love the approach that you have of saying there’s different uses for different folks of this. The scholarly linguist may find something here, the pastor, but also anyone who is a student of the Bible who’s just interested in digging into what God’s word says and from a different perspective, that you’re not likely to find too many other places. This is a tool available to you too. I was recently teaching a PhD class, and I hesitate to say it because again, I don’t want it to all of a sudden sound inaccessible. 

31:49
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so it’s not just for PhD folks, for anybody who’s a student of the Bible, but I was teaching some PhD students, and one of these guys is a campus pastor at Purdue University. And so I told the group about the tips tool, and he started looking at it overnight. And he came back to class the next morning and was just excited about what he found there and already thinking about ways he could use it in his preaching. But also he’s got a whole population of international students there and just looking for ways or insights to connect with them. 

32:19
Rich Rudowske
And so even the majority language stuff, looking at something in Chinese, for example, or indian language, would give him insights into their world a little bit, where he felt like he could see the opportunity to make connections with them if he kept digging in that way. So I thought that was pretty exciting and a really unique way that it could be used. And I think there’s just so many other possibilities if the tool can become more widespread and that more folks make use of it. 

32:47
Jost Zetzsche
Thank you for sharing that. That’s really, of course, great for me and for us to hear. And of course, that is one area, what you just mentioned at the end of what you were saying, that we are trying to make the tool more widely known. That’s of course, one of the reasons why we’re talking here on this podcast, but also been trying to write articles about it and try to be talking about the tool in different outlets. So if anyone is interested in me writing something or if somebody else wants to write something about it, I’d be very open to that, because we do want the tool used as much as possible. And there is really no plan to ever commercialize the tool. It’s just a free tool that comes from all these languages and is freely given to us. 

33:36
Jost Zetzsche
So we are just freely distributing it to others as well. 

33:41
Emily Wilson
So, I mean, as we’re all coming together and it is freely distributed and most of the people who are going to be interacting with it, our english speakers in the west. Right. That there is an opportunity to look outside of our bubble, which can very often happen within the US context. How can we just expand on our view of scripture and our cultural perspectives by using this tool? 

34:10
Jost Zetzsche
Well, that’s a deep question, of course, and there’s probably a number of answers to it, I think, especially in the american context. I think that american people, but American Christian, also tend to be sometimes very american focused, don’t really understand that there is much outside of America they might know that, of course, everybody knows that there’s different languages spoken, but the fact that there’s more than 6000 other languages spoken, and that the fact also that any of these languages is fully capable of translating the Bible and is in and of itself perfect because it perfectly suits the needs of its speakers. So it’s just as perfect as English is, as Spanish is, as Chinese is, whether it’s spoken by 300 people or five people, or by more than a billion people, languages like Chinese or so. 

35:16
Jost Zetzsche
And I think that in itself is a really rich message, that the church is truly international. It is spoken, God is spoken to and read about in so many languages. There’s three and a half thousand languages altogether that the Bible, or parts of the Bible have been translated into. That’s a mind boggling number, right? Mind boggling, unimaginable. And of course, we’re trying to get more and more languages in our tool of those three and a half thousand. But just the fact that the church is not centered in any place, but it’s centered in the hearts of people everywhere, essentially. 

35:54
Jost Zetzsche
No matter the language, no matter the culture, no matter the ethnic belonging, that I think is a really powerful message and a message that I’m really proud to share and to be honest, a message that I continue to understand more and more as I’m working in this tool and can just marvel at. 

36:15
Rich Rudowske
Awesome. This has been really great. How can we be praying for you and your ministry? 

36:21
Jost Zetzsche
Well, you can pray for my programmer, who is sick right now, who actually, I think needs prayer. So if you would do that would be great. And my greatest wish right now, really, is that the tool is more widely used. And so I think it is relatively wide known within Bible translation circles. I’m active in some of the communities that we talked about earlier, so people know about that there, but I want it to be used by the church more than it is now. And so for us to find ways to communicate that would be really great and really helpful, I think. 

37:00
Emily Wilson
Well, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this morning. And we definitely are going to share with our listeners how they can get to the tips page and look through that to enrich their understanding of scripture and to pray for people around the world that God’s word may be made known. 

37:21
Jost Zetzsche
Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Reg. 

37:26
Emily Wilson
So that interview was just really amazing to be able to get a little bit of an insight on where this project came from, this idea of why are we limiting just the richness, the tool of scripture, and how we can grow from it and then not be able to share that between language communities. And so very often in the Bible translation movement, it’s conveying how important these scriptures are in the context and delving into what does this mean? What is the back translation like? And oh, I would have never noticed that before. I know you’ve talked before about how this tool would have been so helpful before going on partnership development to convey these are different translations of scripture, but they’re all pointing to the story of salvation and Christ and just how we have so much to learn from one another. 

38:26
Rich Rudowske
That’s right, and we encourage you to at least check out the tool tips. It’s tips translation Bible available at no cost to anybody who’d like to use it. So we invite you to check it out and share it with all your friends. Thank you for listening to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. You can find past episodes of the podcast@lbt.org slash podcast or subscribe on audible, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow lutheran Bible translators’social media channels on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s word in their hands. This episode of the centrally translatable was produced and edited by Andrew Olson. Our executive producer is Emily Wilson. Podcast artwork was designed by Caleb Rotewald. 

39:18
Rich Rudowske
Music written and performed by Rob White. I’m Rich Rudowski. So long for now.