The Religion Guy has touted the investigative chops of the Ministry Watch website and its usefulness as a story source for journalists. Let’s re-up that message.

Along with assorted financial and moral scandals, President Warren Cole Smith has been examining what he calls the "Bible translation industry" (which prefers to call itself a "ministry"). This is a very popular cause among U.S. Protestants, with revenues of around $500 million a year. The biggest group, Wycliffe Bible Translators, took in $227 million in 2020.

In articles here (“Outsourcing Bible Translation?”), here (“Translation Service Providers Could Be Paradigm-Changing For Bible Translation Industry”) and finally here (“Just How Broken Is the Bible Translation Industry?”) Smith has been criticizing translation groups for taking so long and spending so much money to produce a Bible translation in a new language when the need is so great.

To force a massive speedup, Smith promotes the fascinating idea of applying the technology used widely by businesses and governments for necessary rapid translations of contracts, diplomatic exchanges, scientific articles, movie scripts and the like. Such biblical projects are already under way, and that provides a solid feature idea for reporters to pursue.

A consortium of traditional Bible translation organizations, illumiNations, figures the planet has around 7,000 languages currently being spoken, of which 3,700 have little or no scripture. It seeks to fill that gap by 2033, and states that it typically takes seven years to render the New Testament and 16 years for a complete Bible. At the present rate, Smith comments, the task will take till at least A.D. 2150.

As a former business executive, Smith argues that Christian donors should reasonably expect 10 times the new Bibles than are actually being produced and, while chiding groups for lack of financial transparency, estimates it takes not only many years but many millions of dollars to produce a new translation. He says the current experimental phase of the new high-tech scheme indicates radically shortened time frames are possible at a cost of a mere $350,000 per new Bible.

Big, if true. That’s a news story.