USA (MNN) — Faith Comes By Hearing has produced Audio Bible recordings in hundreds of languages using their traditional recording method of sending teams to regions where a language is primarily spoken and finding local participants to voice the various characters found in Scripture.
Earlier this year, the ministry introduced a new system called Virtual Recording to compliment the traditional method. By utilizing online technology, Virtual Recording (VR) has opened worldwide participation to anyone with a computer, a microphone, and an Internet connection. The ministry is proud to announce that the first full New Testament–the World English Bible–has been completed through VR added to their ever-growing Digital Bible Platform.
For the World English Bible (WEB) recording, Faith Comes By Hearing (FCBH) received over 500 auditions. The ministry recruited voice talent by using social media such as Facebook and Craigslist, as well as word-of-mouth support from longtime partnering churches from across the country. While some were professional voice talents, the vast majority consisted of everyday people wanting to participate in the pilot project to help work out the bugs in the system. Additionally, there were over 200 people who signed up solely to review, evaluate, and comment on recorded audio files.
“The response and enthusiasm of the participants was truly amazing,” comments Bill Lohr, a spokesman for the ministry. “We had moms, dads, kids, even members of the military, and one gentleman who is a U.S. postman. So many people were excited to be a part of this incredible new technology.”
While 90% of the recording was completed within four weeks, the overall objective of this first project was more or less to act as a beta test and evaluate the VR system. Learning from this initial foray into online recording, the ministry is exuberant about the possibilities this technology brings to completing their work.
“This was an entirely new concept for us just last year,” continues Lohr. “But now we have a tool that gives us the capability to speed up and complete Scripture recording at a rate we never imagined possible.”
There are currently seven new non-English projects that have launched and dozens more scheduled for the very near future, including Old Testaments and portions.* In the last six months, the ministry has seen more than 150,000 unique visitors to the site from over 100 countries, with more than 3,000 people submitting auditions.
FCBH is also in the process of translating, or ‘localizing,’ the Virtual Recording Web site into major trade languages for easier access and use by participants around the world. Currently, Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish have joined the original English page, with Uzbek expected to go live soon.
The ministry anticipates doing hundreds of recordings simultaneously on the Virtual Recording system, with the result of expediting their goal of recording the Bible in every translated language.
