His Word for My Neighbour – Oral Scripture Translations in Dialect
- comms441
- Oct 16
- 3 min read
Report on Wycliffe Singapore's 'Stories from the Field' event, held on 1 Jul 2025, in which Evelyn shared about her work in oral scripture translations in dialect.
A Multilingual Childhood
Evelyn began by sharing about her childhood – growing up in the streets of multilingual Melaka town meant that she was exposed daily to multiple dialects spoken in the house, marketplace and school. Interestingly, everyone would speak in their own dialect even to people of other dialects, and all would understand each other! There were also Indian and Malay friends in the mix.
With this heritage, she was well-placed to pick up linguistics and translation skills, and could see patterns in languages with more ease than most. Moreover, she fully appreciates how their heart language is special to each people group, and their pride in hearing and having scripture in their own language.
Why Oral Bible Translation (OBT)?
Although Bible translation has mostly been done in written forms, oral forms work better for certain groups of people. These include the elderly, those who are not very literate, and those with some disabilities. Sometimes, there may not be a widely accepted writing system which makes producing a written Bible difficult or contentious.
An oral Bible is different from an audio Bible; audio Bibles are the reading out of a previously translated written Bible. And oral Bible is primarily intended to be spoken aloud and listened to, and the words and expressions used will reflect this while keeping true to the meaning of the Bible.
OBT is a multistage process which begins with listening to several versions of the passage read out from Bibles in languages the team can understand. There will be someone to guide the team in learning about the background and meaning of the passage, activities such as drawing or acting to help them remember the details, and then they will practise retelling the passage, working on key terms and other expressions till they are satisfied that it is clear, accurate and natural. This draft will be recorded, then go through team and community checking, and then be checked by a translation consultant. Finally, it will be recorded again for distribution.
The Penang Hokkien OBT Project
Evelyn is now based in Penang, working on the Penang Hokkien OBT project, which arose out of need. She responded to a call from Joanna from Youth With a Mission (YWAM) to help translate the Jesus Film into Penang Hokkien. YWAM runs a drop-in centre serving the homeless and the poor, and a ‘street church’ too. They found that the Jesus Film dubbed in Amoy Hokkien was not understood by speakers of Penang Hokkien! There was a real need to translate.
God uses His word to reach the lost
Evelyn shared a story of the impact of oral scriptures. At a community checking session, when the oral version was read to an audience who heard it for the first time, a non-believing gentleman was so moved that Jesus had compassion on ‘sheep without a shepherd’ that he prayed to received Christ that day.
All in all, it was eye-opening to hear Evelyn share about OBT. Please uphold the Penang Hokkien and Hakka OBT projects in prayer, as well as other OBT projects in different parts of the world.
About the Speaker
Evelyn currently serves as a translation consultant. Her multiethnic and multilingual childhood gave her an early start to missions training! Over the past 20 years, she has worked with 42 languages, helping translation teams in many places geographically and/or culturally close to her. Her life is testimony to the fact that doing missions does not necessarily entail going to faraway places; working cross-culturally can be within your own city, just across a bridge or an hour's flight away.
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