Our Statement of Faith:

We affirm that eternal life with God and salvation from sin and death are found through faith in Jesus Christ. People come to such a faith through the message of the Bible, which is inspired by God, and contains the primary and essential revelation that God wants us to have. While it is possible for people to know God and trust in Jesus without having the Bible itself, we believe that the Bible is invaluable in the development of one's faith and personal relationship with God. Therefore every person should have access to the entire Bible in his own language.

 

We also accept common Christian beliefs, as, for instance, expressed in the Nicene Creed.

 

........................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Our Members:

Dr. Tod Allman

President and Cofounder of TBTA Inc.

Tod first became interested in Bible translation during his final year at Talbot Theological Seminary. During that year he took a class about Bible translation and learned about the millions of people who don't have God's Word in a language that they can understand.  Being a software engineer, he began developing a computer program to help missionaries who are translating the Bible into other languages. After graduating from Talbot, he studied linguistics in order to further develop the Bible translation software. After completing a Masters degree in linguistics, Tod spent approximately 20 years developing the software.  He then went back and completed a Doctorate in linguistics in order to further refine the translation system.  The software is now able to generate drafts of portions of the Bible in many different languages.  Tod is currently involved in enhancing the software, developing the semantic representations that are used when translating the biblical books into other languages, and also in assisting missionaries who want to translate large portions of the Bible into other languages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Stephen Beale

Secretary and Cofounder of TBTA Inc.

Stephen has been associated with Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) and The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) for nearly 25 years. After receiving his Master’s degree in Linguists in 1989, he and his family served WBT and SIL for two years in Thailand. Stephen then returned to the U.S. to pursue his Doctorate in Computational Linguists at Carnegie Mellon University. While studying there, Stephen worked with two SIL translators in Vanuatu to translate the Old Testament book of Ruth using a prototype of the TBTA program. In 2000, the Beale family returned to Vanuatu for three years, where Stephen was the translation consultant for a Bible translation project on the small island of Motalava. Since 2003, Stephen has been a research professor at the University of Maryland, continuing to pursue issues in natural language text analysis and translation. He is currently working with the Tanna translation team again to produce a translation of Genesis. He is also involved in producing the underlying semantic representations of the Bible that TBTA uses. Stephen is particularly committed to using TBTA to bring Old Testament translations to potentially thousands of language groups that - apart from TBTA - would never benefit from more than half of God’s Word in their native tongue.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Richard Denton

Treasurer and Cofounder of TBTA Inc.

Richard is a Research Professor at Dartmouth College, specializing in the computer simulation of plasmas, or ionized (electrically charged) gasses. His personal website is at www.Dartmouth.edu/~rdenton. While working at Dartmouth, Richard took a number of linguistics courses, with the intention of working on Bible translation after he retired. In 2007, Richard took a course at Dartmouth on computational linguistics and wrote a paper on computer assisted translation. He sent that paper to some people at Wycliffe Bible Translators to see if they were interested in the concept, and they put him in touch with Tod. Since then Richard has been helping Tod and Stephen develop the semantic representations in TBTA. Richard's primary interest is in the New Testament, since he has studied biblical Greek.