Translation Approaches of the Jesus Film

The Jesus Film has been translated into over 2200 languages and has been used to accelerate translation into smaller people groups. Its impact in ministry can be seen all around the world with people placing their faith in Jesus and new churches being started. At the same time, the complexity of adapting from the book of Luke or translating the script orally is quite complex to maintain the authenticity of the Biblical text and fit the film to the constraints of lip-sync, timing, and performance.

This abstract will explore the different multimodal translation approaches of producing a Jesus Film Script while maintaining the ethical quality needed for the translation to be accepted by people and still maintain the accuracy of being Scripture on film. We will look at how technology has helped translators produce scripts that are Clear, Accurate, Natural, and Acceptable to the people plus make it look like the actors are speaking the language of the people. We will explore both oral and written approaches to producing a Jesus Film script as well as the experiential training approaches that allow the translators to engage with the script in a new way.