Multilingualism Assessment Tool

Additional Description

Churches as well as organizations within the Bible translation movement will need to collaboratively wrestle with the following issues: What languages are used to access Scripture? Are all people sufficiently served by those Scriptures? Do people need (more) BT materials in the heritage languages? Etc. The Multilingualism Assessment Tool (MAT) was created to help assess the above issues and create a greater awareness for relevant BT strategies in the specific settings.

This May Be A Good Fit For Your Community If:

If your community uses more than one language, this tool will help you to create awareness on how those languages are used and by which subgroup of the population. As a result it will better help discover how those languages complement each other for Scripture access. It will help you determine what additional Scripture portions might be needed, in which of the languages, for what group, and in what possible medium.

How This Works

MAT is intended to create greater awareness for those who are seeking to serve the churches or the community with access to Scripture. Awareness-creation on multilingualism happens through participatory engagement—having people talk and think about their setting—using a facilitated process. MAT provides an engagement framework for a group (or groups) of people. The primary tool to use is a Typology Assessment tool that helps people discover quickly what type of multilingualism they are facing. The additional tool is the “Going Deeper” process through participatory engagement around five questions or five sets of questions. The tool also comes with advice on what might work best for the general multilingual situation that you have found in your assessment.