In the current environment, not much emphasis is given to linguistic foundations in the planning and funding of Bible translation projects. For the most part it is assumed that mother-tongue translators are supremely equipped for Bible translation just by virtue of expertly speaking the language into which the translation takes place.

It is indeed true that mother-tongue translators are the experts about the use of their languages – no outsider can ever hope to attain a command of the language as good as theirs. But this does not mean that a speaker of a language can consciously access all necessary grammatical information without any kind of training. Even well-educated English-speakers would find it a very difficult task to explain to someone when exactly they would use the perfect form of a verb as opposed to the regular past. The same is true for Bible translators – if the principles that govern the use of language structures are not fully understood, then translation often defaults to replicating the forms of the source language, and translations become unnatural at best, if not even misleading or theologically inaccurate.

The more  translators consciously know about the forms and rules of their own language, the more they are prepared to make the correct choices when translating into their languages. This requires that these structures are researched, and that translators and translation consultants have access to this information.

It is entirely justifiable to ask how much linguistics is necessary for good Bible translation, and what linguistic questions in particular need to be answered. There may have been a time in SIL's history when the answer to this was just "more is better." Any kind of linguistic information could turn out to be useful for Bible translation, and therefore broad and deep linguistic research was allowed and even encouraged. This has frequently led to frustrations in two ways: some Bible translation practitioners felt that they had to go through an enormous amount of research before they could finally approach the task of Bible translation proper. Some of this research appeared to be so removed from what is actually needed for translation that it was seen as a huge hoop to jump through, without apparent benefit. Secondly, for Bible translation partners and donors, SIL's high emphasis on research appeared to be a big roadblock and distraction on the way towards completed Bible translation, and the frustration was especially severe when the SIL staff on the translation team apparently got lost in producing one linguistic paper after another without actually even attempting to make progress with the translation.

This may well be why in the past decades the pendulum swung back to the opposite side, so that nowadays almost no linguistic research is planned for in any project setup. SIL linguists therefore need to acknowledge that not all linguistic research is strictly necessary to achieve a good linguistic basis for translation. At the same time, there are fully justified complaints that without any linguistic research, such a basis will never be attained.

This page therefore attempts to define some mininmal linguistic standards for Bible translation. What follows has been agreed upon by several SIL linguistic consultants, coordinators and practitioners. We hope that by outlining a set of standards and deliverables we can contribute to a better understanding among our partners and donors that a minimum amount of linguistic research and knowledge is indispensible for Bible translation to succeed. We will present these standards and deliverables by linguistic domain, and in each case we want to address the following questions:

1. What impact do we want to see by doing this?

2. Deliverables: what sort of documents are to be produced?

3. What rationale lies behind this research?

4. What stories can we tell that illustrate the need?

5. The content: how to get to the deliverables?

Some of these questions can be answered in short statements, while others require longer responses - they may sometimes link to a different document where more detailed information is given.

One of the reasons for the decline in linguistic work over the past decades may have been the profound change of the Bible translation workforce. In the old times, each Bible translation team consisted of the mother-tongue translators plus at least one fully trained linguist, who was usually an expat advisor. This linguist/translator was expected to conduct all the necessary linguistic research, and to make sure that the results of this research adequately affected the translation work in all of its facets.

Nowadays many translation teams do not have any trained linguist among them, and the mother-tongue translators do not have sufficient training to conduct the research necessary to ensure a good quality of the translation, even according to the minimal standards outlined above. We believe that therefore the research needs to be done by people outside of the translation project, and its results need to be integrated by the translation team by any one or more of the following measures:

• Conduct the research in participatory ways together with the members of the translation team. This is best done using a workshop program where the Bible translators together with highly trained linguistic experts address various issues, such as phonology, orthography design, basic grammar, word collection, or discourse analysis. Such participatory workshops increase the ownership of the translation team, and they facilitate a heightened understanding of many issues regarding the language. Certain matters impacting Bible translation to do with phonology and, even more so, with grammar go beyond what translation teams can accomplish in workshops spanning only a couple of weeks, so participatory workshops are not sufficient to accomplish all the minimal linguistic standards for a translation.

• Have a linguist on call who regularly and over a longer stretch of time works with the language team in a way that also the more complex grammatical features of their language are absorbed by the translation team. This will eventually lead to the translators become more and more independent by asking the right questions relevant for their language in their daily translation work. This works best in a cluster project, where the consulting linguist can develop the necessary linguistic understanding for several languages, and, if needed, can fill a few research gaps. Alternatively, new translation projects can invite linguists to work with them for a number of years to not only do the needed research, but to also train the team in applying the linguistic structures of their language in the translation process.

• Increase the linguistic training of all translation consultants, so that they can prepare for each translation consultant session by studying the relevant features of the language. They then can evaluate the draft translation according to the known relevant features, and over time train the mother-tongue translators to pay attention to these features while drafting the next scripture passages.

• Identify especially gifted members of the translation team and give them specific linguistic training sufficient to conduct the necessary research, and to make sure that the other members of the translation team over time grow more experienced in applying their language structures correctly. But this is not a realistic option for all translation projects.

In summary, all of these measures require that somebody conducts the necessary research and that considerable time is spent with the translation team to allow the results of that research to affect the quality of the translation. A Bible translation project that doesn't plan for this to happen has a high probability of producing a translation that will not meet the desired needs.