For my New Testament class this year I’ve decided to try developing a core of study materials for my students using Open Source online resources. Our current curriculum is based on some pretty thin course materials including translations of study guides and illegal photocopies of books.
Intro and outline
For starters, I’m going to be using study guides from the Bible.org website (http://bible.org/passage) translated into Portuguese by Google translate. So far I’ve found that Google Translate does a decent job and we will then clean up the translation as we work through each study guide. Daniel Wallace has published an “Introduction, Argument, and Outline” for each book of the New Testament. We’ll be using those for Galatians through Philemon this semester and if it goes well we’ll do the same thing for General Epistles in the second semester.
On the surface, there are some problems with this approach. First, a machine-based translation is going to result in errors in meaning. Second, Wallace’s intros are pretty brief and necessarily ignore a lot of the complexity inherent in Biblical studies. Third, it would be preferable to have an authoritative resource specifically designed for the African, or in this case Mozambican, context.
Despite those problems, I feel this is a viable way to provide a sizable amount of quality information that has the following characteristics:
- It’s from a recognized authority. (He also references the big names for study of each book)
- It’s in recognizable Portuguese as opposed to incomprehensible English.
- It’s freely shareable and reproducible as outlined in the Bible.org terms of use (http://bible.org/copyright)
Source text
For my class I will be using the freely shareable Portuguese translation produced by the World Bible Translation Center. I continue to be impressed by this translation and the big bonus is that they allow us to use it, print it and modify it as needed. No other Portuguese translation of the Bible has so much going for it. (Note: it’s only New Testament).
Electronic Tools
Currently I have a version of BPBible that has a Portuguese interface and several Portuguese translations. The versions I have are:
- WBTC: A free and legitimate text
- ACF: An unsourced electronic version of the Corrigida e Fiel (A Majority Text translation much used in Mozambique)
- NTLH: An illegal version of the Nova Tradução Linguagem de Hoje which is an excellent translation of the Bible in contemporary Brazilian English.
Additionally, I have included the NET Bible in English and the Westcott Hort with NU changes in Greek. Unfortunately I haven’t found any proper dictionaries or commentaries that work with SWORD modules (which is the system used by BPBible).
BPBible has the additional advantage of working on a USB Drive so each student can have their own version to carry with them.
Summary
I’m really grateful to organizations like Bible.org and World Bible Translation Center who make it easy for others to use their materials in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, the bulk of Bible study information and Bible translations is locked behind copyright restrictions that don’t protect the resources but rather limit their impact and result in the proliferation of corrupt versions (see ACF) and illegal versions (see NTLH).
I welcome your feedback on this project. If you know of Free and Open Source resources that could help my students, please let me know.
