Do you by chance know how many LDS congregations or members use ASL to some extent?

I wonder if they are doing something in other languages (such as Portuguese, which faces almost exactly the same problem as Spanish).

I do wonder what the implications of this move might be. In English, LDS book publishers don’t have to worry about copyright issues for the scriptures. But in almost every other language, it is an issue.

The Mormon Translation project, for example, is working on translating the “History of the Church,” which includes full sections from the Doctrine and Covenants throughout the text. Retranslating those sections into Spanish, Portuguese or another language seems like a waste of time, and would cause confusion because the text would be different from the scriptures. SO, the project will have to seek permission from the Church to publish these sections as part of the translation.

Will the Church give that permission? Will we have to pay for it? I don’t know. I worry most of all that the project will be completed, and the Church will insist on some kind of control over the publication, or else it won’t give permission.

I’m sure once we start thinking about this situation, other issues will arise too.

I imagine that the main reason the Church isn’t pursuing translations of the Bible in other languages is simply because there are so many languages in which the Church operates and the Scripture Guide is a much more effective way to provide consistent, effective study aids without having to struggle through years of international copyright issues.

I don’t think this decreases the effectiveness of the Bible in other languages – I find that Japanese members have a curiously intense fondness for the Old Testament and study it pretty faithfully. It strengthens their understanding of what it means to study with the Spirit and seek personal revelation.

Kent,

I’ve searched repeatedly over the years for an electronic version of JFA with a clear provenance that is in the Public Domain but I’ve never found one. All the online ones I’ve seen are the versions of Sociedade Biblica do Brasil, Sociedade Bíblica Trinitariana, and Imprenſa Bíblica Brasileira posted without permission.

I wasn’t aware of Distributed Proofreaders; I’ll definitely check out what they are doing and see what I could contribute there. Thanks for the tip.

You may be, at least in part, reinventing the wheel. Have you searched for other public domain editions already available? I think I’ve seen these available already.

You should also know that Distributed Proofreaders is working on the 1909 Ferreira de Almeida. They have a very good track record at producing accurate transcriptions — I recommend that you look at what they are doing.

While both the 1914 edition you are working on, and the 1909 edition are in the public domain in the US, I’m not at all sure about elsewhere. I haven’t researched it yet, but it is possible that these editions are still under copyright in Brazil or Portugal.

The Church’s website makes the GEE available online (see, e.g., GEE em Portugues).

Most (if not all?) Bible e-texts in Portuguese that you can find online are for one of the revisions still under copyright. (See, for example, this discussion on the SWORD mailing list, and this Portuguese Wikipedia discussion.)

For the past couple of months I’ve been working on re-typing a João Ferreira de Almeida edition published by the American Bible Society in 1914 which is in the . I’m starting with the New Testament and am now midway through it.

There are definitely a number of orthographic changes that have transpired that would need to be updated (elle -> ele being one of the most simple examples). Even worse there are plenty of anachronistic terms that would need to be updated as well to make the text equally usable to the average reader.

Recently I’ve gone back and have begun tagging the verses with comparable footnotes based on the English version of the Bible, substituting GEE references for TG/BD/JST when a comparable GEE entry exists. So far I’ve completed this work only for the book of Matthew, but haven’t yet found a satisfactory means of typesetting the verses and footnotes (in TeX/ConTeXt).

It’s been an enjoyable way of studying the scriptures. Whether or not it would some day be publishable… I don’t know. I’m inclined to think Ardis is right that people would be quite skittish re: authority. Also, are the English footnotes subject to copyright? Does a cross reference count as a sufficiently creative endeavor to warrant copyright protection or is it more of an uncopyrightable fact? I don’t know. (Standard disclaimer: IANAL.)