Copyright at the most basic level simply states who owns a Bible. This is important for several reasons. First, people have to know where to go to get a copy of that Bible. If a translation is just floating out there with no “owner.” It is highly likely that errors can creep into a translation. Many of the public domain Bibles out there are full of typographical errors, ommissions and sometimes purposeful emendations. By copyrighting a Bible, a Bible agency states their responsibility for the integrity of that text.

At this moment I am writing this article. It’s unpublished and I will do some editing to it before I hit “Publish.” But once I publish it, I as the author am automatically granted copyright of my own work without doing anything else. I don’t need to register my work with the US Copyright Office. I don’t need to put a little c with a circle around it at the bottom of every page. Simply by being the author of this work I hold the copyright whether I want to or not.

Now, I can choose to make my text available in a variety of ways. I can claim “All rights reserved.” That means you can’t do anything with my text without getting my permission first. Or I can grant a “Creative Commons” license for you to reproduce my work as long as you acknowledge that I am the author.The same is true for Bible translations.

Copyrights are not the area that we need to be concerned about in looking at whether or not Bibles are accessible to the people that are meant to use them. Instead it is the area of licenses, or “terms of use” that need to concern us. You’ve probably noticed that in the opening pages of your Bible there is a copyright notice and then some text like, “You may reproduce up to 500 verses as long as you say that this is version ABC of the Bible.” That’s a standard term of use for Bibles. And in the case of large well-established Bible translations for a highly literate and financially secure population, that will usually be all that is necessary.

It gets more complicated when you start looking at smaller language groups that are traditionally marginalized and lack the economic might of a large ethnic group. In these cases, boilerplate licenses for “big” Bibles often don’t work. As I mentioned in my article about the Ndau Bible, you’ve got a combination of factors that are resulting in lack of access to the Scriptures: a poorly resourced Bible society is unable to print sufficient copies, low literacy rates and lack of distribution channels mean that using a single agency to supply the needs of 2.4 million people is not going to work. It’s in cases like this that the copyright owners of a work need to seriously consider using a different form of licensing for their Scripture.

Consider the example of the Catholic translation of the Bible in Makhuwa, one of the largest languages in Mozambique. When our organization spoke with the archbishop of Nampula province about the possibility of distributing their translation as audio, he was thrilled to let us do it. In fact he gave one of our techies the electronic copies of the translation in hopes that we could publish them on the web so that priests and others who use the Scripture in their duties could download Scripture whenever they needed it.

That’s a wonderful example of a copyright owner who sees the value of creating terms of use that are sufficiently flexible to allow others to help them distribute their translation. Now this doesn’t mean that anyone who wants to can just take those Scriptures and change the wording to suit their own theology. And another thing that the Catholics need to consider is whether they will be comfortable with others printing out their Scripture and selling it on the street. On one hand someone else is making money off their hard work. On the other hand, savvy entrepreneurs are getting Makhuwa Scripture into the hands of those who want it.

Another example that bears consideration is the Bibles owned by the Bible Society of South Africa. Their terms of use are pretty restrictive which at first glance would seem to be negative. But the truth is that the Bible Society of South Africa does an excellent job of distributing Scripture in many formats in South Africa. Earlier this week, I sent an SMS to a friend asking where I could get a Xhosa Bible and she wrote right back and said, “Just go to any CNA or Christian bookstore.” And it’s true. The CNA and Checkers in the Blue Route mall which is only a few kilometers from our house both have Bibles in many languages. (I wish they would distribute the English CEV rather than the KJV but that’s a minor quibble.) They are also doing a good job of distributing audio and electronic versions of their Bibles.

So in summary, you can see that copyright is not a sinful thing that shouldn’t be used for Bibles. Rather, as long as the Scripture is available in at least one translation for a people group and accessible in whatever formats are most appropriate then there’s no problem. In those cases where a single Bible agency is not able to resource the needs of a language group, they should consider allowing their Scriptures to be used by others in order that the Bible might have maximum impact.

One of the key metrics that people look at when evaluating the potential for evangelization is the availability of Scripture. However, availability doesn’t mean that anyone necessarily has access to the Scriptures. I’m going to show how this works using the Ndau language spoken in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Ndau of Mozambique and Zimbabwe

Demographics: 2.4 million people

The number of first-language speakers of Ndau is listed by various sources as between  2.1 and 2.4 million people. The majority of Ndau speakers live in central Mozambique from the Zimbabwe border to the coast of the Indian Ocean. There are possbily 1.6 million speakers of Ndau in Mozambique according to the 2006 census (quoted in the Ethnologue). In Zimbabwe, the number of Ndau speakers is thought to be around 800,000 people.

Scripture Availability: Full Bible (1957 and 2008), recent New Testament (1999), dramatized New Testament

The situation for Scripture availability in Ndau is quite good. A full Bible has existed since 1957. A recent New Testament was produced in 1999 followed by a full Bible in 2008. And a dramatized version of the New Testament is available for free download on the Internet through Faith Comes By Hearing.

Let’s focus for a minute on the 2008 Ndau Bible. According to representatives of the Zimbabwean Bible Society, 5,000 copies of the New Testament were produced. As a way of visually representing this printing consider the following grid:

This grid is 48×48 squares, each representing 1,000 speakers of the Ndau language in Mozambique and Zimbabwe*. In the bottom right corner you can see just five red squares representing all the known copies of the Ndau Bible.

* This is just an approximation equaling 2,304,000 people.

So as you can see that the actual availability of the Ndau Bible is really low. It’s worse than that actually because according to a report by Beth Wood in February 2011, her mission was able to purchase only a single copy of the 2008 Ndau Bible. UPDATE 12 May/2011: Since then, their mission has succeeded in purchasing 2,000 copies although they haven’t received delivery at the time of writing.

Scripture Accessibility

While the Scriptures are in principle available in the Ndau language, it is almost impossible to get a copy. Consider these factors:

1. The most recent printing of Ndau New Testaments was 5,000 copies. Copies are available for purchase at a Christian bookstore in Mutare and the Bible Society in Harare.
2. The dramatized version of the New Testament in Ndau is available in only two cities in Mozambique: Beira and Dondo and at the time of writing they don’t have any players to put the recordings on.

Now the reality is actually much worse and much better than the statistics imply. First, the reality is much worse because supposing that every speaker of Ndau magically had a copy of the Bible it is highly unlikely that the majority of them would be able to read it. That’s because the Ndau-speaking people of Mozambique are largely illiterate. For those that are literate they are probably literate in Portuguese or possibly Shona. And to make matters worse, the variant of Ndau used in the 2008 Bible is different from that of the majority of Ndau speakers in Mozambique. Although the various variants of Ndau have more than 80% lexical similarity, that 20% is just the area where most technical and religious vocabulary tends to differ.

Now I said in the last paragraph that the situation is actually better than it appears. What did I mean by that? Well, in many cases, people attending churches in Ndau-speaking regions are likely to have access to some sort of Bible in either a related language like Shona or a language of wider communication like Portuguese.

Finally, a brief note about the dramatized New Testament available from Faith Comes By Hearing. As I mentioned above, the Mozambican Bible Society makes the recording available in only two cities: Beira and Dondo. But these recordings were done with Zimbabwean speakers of Ndau and that is a big problem for the large concentration of speakers of the Mozambican coastal variant of Ndau for the simple reason that Zimbabwean Ndau is tonal but Mozambican coastal Ndau is not. A tonal language conveys all sorts of grammatical and lexical information simply by the pitch of a particular word. The result being that a speaker of coastal Ndau who doesn’t differentiate tone would not have access to all sorts of meaning in a tonal recording.

I’m leaving the preceding paragraph up for reference but it is incorrect on several points. First, the recording was done in Beira with speakers of the coastal (non-tonal) variety of Ndau. Beth Woods states that while this would sound “funny” to speakers of tonal variants of Ndau she doesn’t know of any major grammatical distinctions based on tone.

Summary

In this example we have seen how the Scriptures can be availabie in a language without being accessible. Obstacles to access include:

1. Scarcity: A limited print run
2. Illiteracy: Print Bibles for illiterate speakers
3. Lack of distribution: Only one source of audio Scriptures (and no players currently available)
4. Linguistic variation: Key word choice and tonality

So, what should we learn from this? Don’t equate statistics or statements about Bible translations being available in a language with anyone actually being able to have access to those Scriptures. In the case of Ndau, we’ve seen that Availability does not equal Accessibility.

Information sources:

Ethnologue: Ndau: A language of Mozambique.

Presentation by Beth Wood at the Escutai 2011 conference in Beira, Mozambique (February 2011).

Email correspondence with Beth Wood, May 2011. (Many thanks to Beth for patient correction of this article)