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Global Christianity and the Rise of the Cellphone
Hugh Pickens writes "Alan Jacobs writes in the Atlantic about Every Tribe Every Nation, an organization whose mission is to produce and disseminate Bibles in readable mobile-ready texts for hundreds of languages including Norsk, Potawatomie, Bahasa Indonesia, and Hawai'i Pidgin as the old missionary impulse is being turned towards some extremely difficult technical challenges. The Bible is a large, complicated text containing three quarters of a million words and the typesetting is quite complex because of the wide range of literature types found in scripture and the need for several types of note. 'For all the issues that are still to be solved, ETEN is trying to do things that the world's biggest tech companies haven't cracked yet, such as rendering minority languages correctly on mobile devices,' says Mark Howe. 'There's a unity among Bible translators and publishers that stands in stark contrast to the fractured, fratricidal smartphone industry.' But once these technical challenges are met, it won't be only Bibles only that people can get on their mobile devices, but whole new textual worlds."
True but at least it gives them the drive to solve a knotty problem.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Porn and religion, both a drain on society, but leaders in advancing technology to bring content to the masses.
I wonder how short a religious text could theoretically be, while still sustainably self-replicating between hosts. (i.e. religious believers). Much of the bible is akin to junk DNA.
Bible translation is usually the one taking the big step of documenting a new language and defining a character set for it. So really, this isn't new.
Crowd: OMG 4000 dudes 7 loaves 2 fish
Jesus: Lotsa food now LOL
Crowd: WTFBBQ!
Blah. Even though there is no god, etc., the Bible is still one of the most important texts if you want to understand Western culture and philosophy. Refusing to learn about ideas because they are wrong is simply a more vain and self-glorifying form of anti-intellectualism.
"There's a unity among Bible translators and publishers that stands in stark contrast to the fractured, fratricidal smartphone industry."
Which is really and odd statement considering how many different versions their are, sure one might be able to say what 60-80% are version X, but still major fractions happen over the translations.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
putting a book into the local language and sending an army to kill people - quite a comparison.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Karen Armstrong in one of her TED talks put forth an idea that all religions should concentrate on the Golden Rule - the rule that Confucius created 3,000 years ago. Compassion. Orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy.
We should all act like a compassionate person instead of worrying about how others believe and if they believe "correctly" - which is lost on pretty much every practitioner of the religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
As opposed to the Muslims who conquered Palestine, North Africa, Iberia, Persia, Mesopotamia and southeastern Europe?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!
Looks-the-same format? Wha...? =)
Also, funnily enough (and relevant to the article), one of the groups who is trying to improve (La)TeX's suitability for modern font technologies and supporting obscure languages is SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations. (The end result is XeTeX, one of the best TeX versions out there right now if you want good PDF output and TrueType/OpenType support out of the box.)
To be honest, for technical writing LaTeX+BibTeX is a hell of lot easier to deal with than any word processing software (LyX being the "exception"), at least in my opinion. There are a few non-technical reasons for this, like the fact that most of the relevant conferences and journals in my field publish LaTeX style definitions and that BibTeX citations are available everywhere (and I do not have to procure additional software just for biblioigraphy management).
Palm trees and 8
There's a unity among Bible translators and publishers that stands in stark contrast to the fractured, fratricidal smartphone industry.
Also, alas, in stark contrast to the fractured and occasionally literally fratricidal world of their theological paymasters.
so anything with religious motivation is bad no matter what they do?
that seems as narrow and short sighted as the other way of taking it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Umm what? The the most evil undertaking ever? I am sorry that is complete and utter BS. There have been far more evil deeds done. I will grant you the Crusades were not very 'Christian' but they were no more evil than any other way. Also its worth pointing out that popular idea the Christian powers started it is wrong, Islam had been spread to those areas mostly by force years before, if anything the Crusades were a counter attack.
Do you think war for the cause of national security is necessarily evil?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What a sad life you must lead if you truly believe that a man cannot find his own purpose and happiness.
Yes, it would be most inspiring to read the bible in the original Klingon.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In a sense, yes. If you are logically minded, you know that from false premises, one can prove anything. Someone who is driven to do stuff for bad reasons can do good an evil.
But you have no guarantee. So in some sense, it would be better if there were no drive: that way, you needn't worry that next time, instead of typesetting, it'll be bombs.
No excuses from me; just counteracting the mass fallacy that only the Crusaders were Teh Evil and that the Muslims were a bunch of Little Miss Innocents.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I always find this particular statement perplexing. Apparently it's the Atheists who fear death, yet it's the Christian (amongst others) who need to make up stories about an ever lasting afterlife to make themselves feel better about the fact that people die. Why would you pretend that people "live on" if you're not afraid of death?
No. Why do you believe that I would? Why do you even think that I spend any significant life pondering such philosophical questions? There is no point to life. Life just is. Now that's a concept that Christians do find scary!
Yes, and? Fairy tales about them living up in the clouds might make you feel better, but it doesn't change anything: people die.
What's sad is that Christians have something you will never have. Christians have something to look forward to. They do not fear death and instead, welcome it. They know what life is all about and never spend a moment wondering what is next or what the point is. Their only concern is how to be the best human being possible to ensure a pleasureable eternity after death. They look forward to meeting friends and family and feel their presense throughout life. Their only fear is that they may not be good enough to enter paradise so they spend their lives trying to do good things for their fellow man and being honorable, honest people throughout their life. Material possessions mean nothing more than what they can be used for to better the lives of others, although the Bible is full of stories about people who did great things with nothing.
Oh come on! That's what it says in the marketing material, but in truth most Christians do fear death. They live lives full of guilt, uncertainty and self-hatred and direct that outwardly in an effort to make everybody else feel as shitty as they do.
On the other hand no matter how much money you make how successful you are in life, you will die and that will be the end of it for you. You will go through life wondering what the point of it all is and why it's all worth it. When you lose loved ones, they are gone forever and you know that you will never be able to spend time with them again. No matter how hard you work, how many possessions you acquire, or accomplishments you achieve, you will end up being a bloated, rotting carcus, just like everyone else, and nothing more. The final chapter of your life involves is about compost.
Again, a load of evangelical crap. As an enlightened rational actor in society, you realise that your legacy is what you do with your time, so you try to make the world a better place for the next generation. Yeah, when you are die that's it, but at least you can die happy knowing you did your best, unafraid of the judgement of Gods.
Bible translators have also given us XeTeX, which is now an important part of the TeX ecosystem. And a bunch of useful (and good looking!) fonts: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=FontDownloads
- it is insulting that you think (against evidence, I might add) that atheists cannot have peace of mind. After all, Buddhism is an atheist philosophy, and peace of mind is their trademark.
- It is insulting that you think people do good things just because they are afraid of the great CCTV in the sky. People do good things for their own sake.
- It is insulting that you believe one cannot have any other hope in life than the afterlife. I am a scientist, and my research will live after me, so will my memory in my friends' minds. A writer's books will survive him. And artist's works. The good you do while alive. If you need materially motivated pretexts to do good, there it is.
You should live your life to the fullest, in awe of the universe, precisely because you will return to dust and nothingness. But knowing, because of the immense privilege we have of living now, that we exist because a generation of stars formed, aged and went nova so we could exist as carbon-based lifeforms. We exist because every single one of our ancestors, for four billion years, did no fail to reproduce. We stand half-way to the death of our star, and the beings which will see it die will be as far from us that we are from the first unicellular organism.
You, on the other hand revel in bronze age mythology.
I'll spare you comments about the "no true Scotsman" fallacy you committed in your last paragraph.
They do not fear death and instead, welcome it.
On the contrary, they're scared as hell (pun intended). They fear death so much that they invented heaven.
You will go through life wondering what the point of it all is
Nope, why wonder about such a question? Why should there be a point? And more importantly, why would you rather believe an invented one than accepting it's about as silly as wondering about the smell of an inch?
Even after reading an article about Christians pushing tech that will benefit everyone, all you can do is insult them.
The reason xians are being mocked and insulted here is that they're not doing it for the benefit of everyone, but to shove their propaganda down our throats.
You mean the same Crusades where a group of people tried to regain access to the Holy Land after it was cut off? What do you think the Muslims would do if Israel cut off access to the "Dome of the Rock"? Would you blame them? When they attack Israel, would you call it "among the most evil human undertakings ever"?
Shit like this is just adding weight to the argument that religion is bad. Fighting over something with mumbo-jumbo significance is crazy.
You would think that something the size of the Salvation Army would help form your opinion of a group more so than Mark in accounting.
Oh, it has. The Salvation Army shows me that Christians think it's okay to spread hate about a specific group of God-created individuals (ie., gays and women who would dare to make their own perfectly legal decisions regarding reproductive health) if you help a group of homeless people who think similarly to you (or are at least willing to go through the motions for a hot meal).
Sorry, I'm pretty sure Jesus said "Love thy neighbor," not "Love thy neighbor unless he's a fag or uses contraceptives." I'll start taking it seriously when you do.
What's sad is that Christians have something you will never have.
No, what's sad is Christians who are so deluded by their faith that they cannot imagine what life would be like without it, and so they make up stories about how horrible life must be in order to convince themselves that they made the right choice.
The truth is that I know I have to treasure what I have right now, because eventually I won't be here any more. I have to do my best to leave the world a better place than when I entered it, and I will (hopefully) live on by being fondly remembered for the impact I had on the world and people around me. I don't have to fear not being good enough to enter any "paradise" because I know that's just a fable, and I can do more than my life than spend it trying to appease some invisible omnipotent friend.
I'm not bitter at the ideal, "true" Christian who acts like you described. They sound like nice people. I'm bitter at the real kinds of Christians who actually exist -- the ones who use technology to spread their doctrine of fear and ignorance, tell nonbelievers how horrible they are, and try to use the government to enforce laws that are solely based on their ancient religious texts.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
As opposed to the Muslims who conquered Palestine, North Africa, Iberia, Persia, Mesopotamia and southeastern Europe?
The Muslim Empire was successful in part because they were more tolerant than the rulers they replaced. The Jews in Spain had more rights under Muslim rule than under the Visigoths.
The existence of gods is undecidable. Therefore using it to justify anything is dodgy. Note that using the non-existence of gods is just as dodgy.
You should justify your actions by some reason wholly outside the realm of theogonies. And therefore religion is useless to guide human actions.
I further claim it is harmful. Because it uses an undecidable (and unlikely) premise which is not necessarily shared by all the recipients of the actions.
Exactly - wow, another radicalised agnostic! I thought I was the only one!
You can't prove it either way. You've just got to wait until the ride stops, and see what happens.
It's entirely possible to "give [one's life] to serve others" without perpetuating a dangerous culture. The problem with even the type of Christians you cite is that after adhering to their worldview, they can't be happy with simply having it as their own meaning in life. They actively use it as a weapon against anyone they deem as "different". It's the single most convenient way to justify conflict or discrimination ever invented by man.
I'm sure you'll dismiss this charge as "not what the overall organization is about", but before you do so, I encourage you to consider that a movement is no more than the sum of its parts, regardless of its stated objectives. There's a larger percentage than you're apparently comfortable with acknowledging who would gladly trade someone else's freedom for preservation of their own moral comfort and/or superiority.
This is nothing more than self-righteous fanaticism. Anyone working to perpetuate the organization without understanding that this is what it enables and produces is dangerously naive. That includes you.
For example, the crusades required a lot of drive but are among the most evil human undertakings ever.
You must be smoking some serious stuff. The Crusades? That amateurish, badly organized and to a significant degree self-destructive (Constantinople, 1204) movement that in 200 years managed to pull of a few years total of violent fighting (if at all) and a few conquered cities (many of them just bought off rather then won by siege)?
After learning a bit about crusades, I came to the conclusion that the only dark spot in the crusading movement was the sack of Jerusalem with the concomitant bloodshed; the rest of the crusading event being little more than a farce.
Now, had you mentioned the Muslim conquest of India, that would have been a different thing. With a single expedition, Mahmoud of Ghazni enclaved half a million Indians, leaving tens of thousands dead. That was just a single incident during the centuries of the conflict at the western borders of India. As far as I know, the total death toll during the 1400 years of Muslims attacking Hindus from the west is not far from reaching the insane mark of 100,000,000 deaths. And you talk about the Crusades? Wow. Just...wow.
"Among the most evil undertakings?" No, not even close. Regarding the number of lives destroyed, the crusades pale in comparison even when compared to such seemingly mundane things as car accidents caused by drunks, lenient subprime mortgage policies and IRS tax forms.
Ezekiel 23:20
Or more like a belief in a slightly different superstition. You can spot the people who really believe in atheism and want to evangelise it as much as possible.
No, atheism isn't a a belief, it's the lack of one. And atheists who spend time trying to convince others are few and far between. Most are just not concerned with what others believe at all. Of all the atheists I know, and that's quite a lot, I'm the one most likely to join in an argument about it. But that's more that I like an argument. There are no group meetings. There's nothing to join.
Those with religion like to imagine atheism is just another religion. I'm not sure whether it's a desire to drag everyone down to their own level, or because they habitually make tenuous connections, and something ending in "ism" sounds like it might be a religion.
Here's a great way to troll atheists - get them to try to prove that Richard Dawkins exists.
You've never trolled an atheist with that in your life. It doesn't even start to have the makings of a workable troll theme.
But I prefer to call myself an atheist. Because I lead my life as though no gods existed, as opposed to leading my life as though they might exist. So from the point of view of an external observer, I am not affected by the existence of gods, and therefore I am not and indication of their existence, nor of belief in their existence.
The idea is that to me, something exists if it is observed to have an effect on the universe. Since the effects beliefs in deities cannot be observed from my actions, I am, for the observer, an atheist. Does it make sense?
I've never been approached by Christians pushing religion, but I encounter anti-thiests pushing bigotry and anti-religion on a weekly basis on the internet (between facebook and this/other sites).
If you are from the USA, you are heavily sheltered. They come to my house. They bother my children in public. They infest the local schools. If you haven't had SOMEONE pushing Christianity on you, then you are either a Christian who is already in the club, or you are part of a vanishingly small group of people.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
What do you think the Muslims would do if Israel cut off access to the "Dome of the Rock"? Would you blame them? When they attack Israel, would you call it "among the most evil human undertakings ever"?
Yes, I'd blame them. That's a perfect example of the harmful influence of religion. If it weren't for ridiculous superstitions that scrap of desert would be as worthless as any other scrap of desert. If you're willing to kill people because of ancient mythology, then absolutely I'm willing to call it evil. Most evil ever? Depends on the scale of the atrocity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The crusades were in their own way an example of the "good" in Christianity. A thousand years prior, Roman culture would have just plundered the Middle East for mercantilist gain, and felt no real need for an excuse. Christians felt like they needed an excuse, because Latin Christianity in the person of St. Augustine had stated very clear rules for when a Christian could morally participate in a war (the so-called "Just War Theory") and "plunder" wasn't on the list. Also, you seem to be proceeding on the assumption that Islam posed no real threat to Europe, and that a "flanking campaign" was illegitimate. The reality, if you go back and read the writings of people like Bernard of Clairvaux, is that they (a) felt that by attacking the Byzantines, the Muslims had attacked them (b) were acutely conscious of the fact that Byzantium might fall and that they would then have no buffer from the Saracens and (c) they were scared to death of Muslim aggression because Muslims had already conquered chunks of formerly "Christian" territory (i.e. Spain.)
The whole crusades as a criticism of Christianity thing simply doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, but that doesn't stop devotees by proxy of Bertrand Russell from repeating it to the point of nausea. What I wish such people would do is actually learn some real history and stop flapping their gums until they do.
Sources: Ph.D. in New Testament and early Christianity, active interest in subsequent church history.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
There is no such thing as Christianity-the-religion. There are many sects that form a family, but they are as far apart theologically as, say, Judaism and Catholicism.
"Christians" and devout people of any faith do not get much love, because either they believe only those bits of their holy books which they personally deem moral, and therefore show themselves capable on the one hand of figuring out what is moral by themselves, and on the other hand compelled to justify it in the most ridiculous way, this is harmless but silly. Or they believe their holy books wholesale, and that makes them pretty horrible people.
And then, they claim (like you just did) that other people, without beliefs, are somehow incapable of being good, or moral, or at peace with themselves. This is insulting. Of course you will get mocked: you just insulted people for no reason at all.
As for life being more than science? yes. Every day comfort come from conversations, friendship and love of other humans. But for the mystical and the awe, science is so much more beautiful, profound and inspiring than any myth that no, I don't need any fairy tales to make my life more interesting.
This is the creation as science tells us it happened:
15 000 000 000 years ago, the universe started expanding and cooling down. Hydrogen formed, and lumps of hydrogen condensed to form stars. In the stars, all the elements up to iron were formed. This first generation of stars died, and some of them went nova, thus filling the universe with all the elements we see today. We are made of the stuff of dead stars, 10 000 000 000 years in the making.
From these elements and leftover hydrogen and helium, the sun and the solar system formed 5 000 000 000 years ago. Some 4 000 000 000 years ago, the first self-replicating life-form/bunch of molecules appeared. You are the result of an uninterrupted line going back four billion years ago of organisms, not one of which failed to reproduce.
In four billion years, the sun will die. And the organisms still there to see us will be as far from us as we are from the first self-replicating molecules.
How's that for awesome? And no supernatural needs to be invoked to explain it.
Yes, for its time the Kingdom of Granada was a success. Arts and sciences were encouraged, the status of women was relatively high (a Jewish prayer book with feminine pronouns was discovered there some years ago), and the Muslim rulers tolerated (rather than encouraged) other religions. But I suggest it was a relatively small beacon of light in a dark world, more like Switzerland than part of an empire.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
So if you take the false premise that God does not exist, you can prove anything?
Bear in mind that the theists are just as strong in their beliefs as the atheists, but neither can prove their belief either way and must rely on faith.
The idea that atheists have some sort of "faith" or "belief" that there is no God is a divide by zero function.
What is that with so many fundamentalists? A lack of belief in something does not mean belief in something. Who gets down on their knees every day and prays to "no god" that they profess to not believe in? Who builds a house of worship where people go to have a ceremony every week to something that they believe that they don't believe in?
Imagine someone standing on a street corner, handing out pamphlets that say that there is no God. So they convince someone that there isn't. So the convertor now asks the convert to pray with him.......... to what?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
To know where a lot of western civilization ideas come from? To compare and challenge what a lot of "christian" preachers and politicians claim that it says? A lot of the junk conservative politicians tell "christian" masses in the US would go nowhere if those same masses had good understanding of the Bible. There's lot of interesting stuff in there. In the book of Samuel, you can find a passage where a nation which had laws, judges and teachers (and a God), gets tired of it and wants something more fun; they go like "oh the nations around us have powerful kings, it would be so cool to have one", and they get told "look, if you get a king, he will take your sons and daughters as servants for himself, he will send them to fight useless wars, etc..." And the nation tells the prophet "whatever, we want a king". A few pages later things get awry for them. There's lot of stuff like that, politics, ideology, morality, economics... And just like the above example, a lot of stuff to confront "manifest destiny" "it's God will that we rule by the sword" politics.
Hang in there, there are more than a few slashers that are fully versed in science, and fully faithful to God. Slashdot is a little like a freeway; Everyone has a horn. A few of the posters are more thoughtful and well-reasoned than some, but the questions about faith are here because they are relevant to slashers, and some of the most vitriolic posts are by folks who need a thoughtful response the most.
Remember that Christ was crucified. We who follow him can expect the same.
You talk like to blind person stating that since the colour red cannot be seen, it has no meaning.
You can demonstrate to a blind person that a certain wavelength of light, measurable by scientific equipment, can be filtered and that it has different effects upon both manmade and biological sensors. Thus even a blind person can understand and verify the existence of the color red, even if they may not understand the ramifications of how it is perceived by others.
If the Christian who believes in God and tries to live a moral life acting in kindness towards his neighbours is wrong, when he dies he finds he goes nowhere after death but has lived a good moral life while here on earth.
And if he's spent a large proportion of his life trying to convert people? Or if he's lived a less moral life due to his religion, for example by participating in a holy war, or by helping spread AIDS by preaching against the use of condoms in Africa?
If the atheist is wrong, though he may have lived a moral life, he will still have to stand before God and explain his unbelief.
And this belief is entirely possible to justify rationally. If God does exist and is not capable of being swayed by rational argument, then you're fucked anyway. If God doesn't exist, then it doesn't matter. If God does exist and is rational, then he will accept that atheism is a rational position. You act as if the only two choices Christianity and atheism. This is the flaw in Pascal's wager. There are at more than two religions that say that you will go to some form of hell if you don't belong to them. Each one has exactly the same amount of verifiable evidence for them (i.e. none). If one is true and you believe the wrong one, you go to hell. If one is true and you don't believe either, you still go to hell. You maybe gain slightly on the odds, but some religions (including the abrahamic religions) regard worshiping a false god as being worse than worshiping no god, so even that's a bit of a stretch.
If a Christian dies and discovers that the Valkyries come to take dead people off to feast with Odin, do you really think that the fact that he believed in an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity will be something the Valkyrie will care about?
As for proof... look around at nature. Can you honestly believe it was all an accident? A random chance due to some atoms rattling around until they got in the right order?
The only kind of person who can't believe this is someone who has absolutely no concept of how big the universe is and how long it took. It took billions of years for life to form on this planet. This galaxy contains about 300 billion stars, of which several billion (extrapolating from our current observations) are likely to have planets sufficiently like ours that conditions similar to those where life arose here will occur. There are about 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe (probably more outside of this sphere), and it's entirely possible that there are other universes. Do you really think it unlikely that given about 10 billion years on around a quintillion stars, it is unlikely for complex life to evolve even once? Keep in mind the anthropic principle (in summary, emergent life will always observe its surroundings to be suitable for life because otherwise life would not have emerged). If there is a 0.000000000000000001 probability of life like ours (i.e. DNA based) emerging on a planet like ours somewhere in the universe each year, then you'd expect it to be happening on a very regular basis.
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Wrong. That would be nihilism. You will not find many nihilists, they tend to suicide early on. However, thanks for bringing it up, what you just said is the BIG LIE perpetrated by religion, namely that without it there is nothing. As an atheist, let me assure you that is far from the truth. Ethics are still something that requires a lot of contemplation. Joy of life is to be had. Goals can be set and reached and insights can be gained. Actually, being an atheist is a bit like being a believer, but with less limits and without some stupid fairy-tales to self-indoctrinate yourself with.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As a person that can read Biblical Greek, I would say less than 1%. The 400-year-old English is more likely to get in your way than the translation.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The King James? The Eastern Orthodox? The Coptic? Hebrew? Syriac? Which apocrypha will be in or out? Will they charge extra for those? Get back to me on that, willya?
According to their list of included translations, ETEN's "YouVersion" reader provides 27 English translations so far. This includes the King James that you mentioned, and two Roman Catholic translations (CPDV and Douay-Rheims) which include several Apocrypha not included in the Protestant translations. I'm not sure what you mean by the "Eastern Orthodox Bible": there is a new translation to English by that name, with the New Testament just released and the full release due later this year, so that obviously hasn't been included yet. There is no Coptic translation included yet, but there are three Coptic Church groups so far listed on the YouVersion groups pages, so that's clearly not a problem for them. Hebrew and Syriac are also not available yet. There is no charge for any of the included translations, and they are working to add more translations to the list: according to their "vision" page they're working with other Bible groups to pull in more translations.
SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations.
Offtopic, but they also send people out to very remote areas -- one of their missionaries lived with and studied an Amazon tribe and learned some things that challenged some very fundamental western assumptions about universals in human language.
Right, they really wanted to go and defend Byzantium. That's why during the First Crusade, the crusaders first action was to massacre the Jews in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade#Attacks_on_Jews_in_the_Rhineland.