VAST

VAST stands for audio/video based translation strategy. I just heard of VAST this week when Susan, a Discovery alumni who is now serving with The Seed Company described some training she is currently doing to learn how to work with an oral people who have forbid writing their language (and let me quote a bit from Susan's blog)

"have a community commitment to protect their ethnic identity and purity by protecting their language, which means that they refuse to teach it to outsiders. Furthermore, they do not allow their language to be written down, to safeguard it from others.

So how would you go about translating the Bible into a language that is forbidden to be written down? Is it possible to share God's Word with these people in their mother tongue, without violating their exclusively oral culture?"

VAST is another method of Bible translation being piloted which will speed the translations needed for oral societies and the demand for putting these languages into the Jesus Film. You might remember a couple years ago when one of our future Discovery participants was reading the part of Jesus for the Jesus film in his mother tongue language; Koni. Well... that worked because the New Testament was already translated in his language. What VAST allows translators to do is (and again I quote from Susan's blog) "use audio-visual media to complete translation tasks without writing a single word or developing an alphabet. This method is a huge booster shot for oral translation projects..." 

The Jesus Film audio being recorded in Koni (Ghana 2010)