3-Minute Promo Video Script Idea


Writing screenplays is not my field of expertise, so this is only an idea...

Open on globe turning in space, USA centered. Zoom in and fly-over to SE Asia... India... Africa... Fade slowly to single lines of various (non-Roman) languages (frex Jn.3:16 in those languages) swirling around...

Voice-over:

180 million people, about half the population of the USA, have no part of the Bible in their language, 1500 languages with not even one verse. In 2000 years we have the complete Bible translated into some 500 languages, maybe another 1300 languages in the last century have a complete New Testament, ...


Cut or fade to Bible opening and pages turning, which morph into calendar pages turning.

Voice-over does not stop:

... but it takes a trained and dedicated linguist up to 25 years to translate the Bible into a new language...


Image morphs back to open Bible with Greek text on left, blank on the right. A pen in hand comes in to start writing that verse in non-Roman language on that blank page.
 

...but much of that work is repetitious. There are two parts to translation,
[hilight the Greek page]
understanding the source text, and
[hilight the new text page being written]
saying the same thing in the other language. Every translator
[hilight Greek page again and zoom in]
does exactly the same work to understand the source. We could save a lot of time by doing that job once. There are a lot of similar...


Pan over to the translation page and fade to line after line scrolling by, "And the LORD God said... And the LORD said, And the LORD spoke to Abraham... and the LORD God said to Moses.. Thus saith the LORD of Hosts... declares the LORD God of Israel... And Jesus answered and said... And Jesus answered and said..." all actual lines from the English Bible (in order).
 

...sentences in the Bible, but varying just a little, so they must be translated individually, one by one. There are 750,000 words in the Bible, but less than 10,000 unique concepts. If each translator told a computer how to say each concept, and if the computer had the whole Bible in a computer-readable representation of those concepts,...


Pan back to the Greek page and zoom out, showing a computer screen under the Bible. The Bible scrunches into a funnel at the top of the computer, and the screen shows single Bible words (verbs, names, etc, starting with John 3:16 concepts, each with a L&N concept number attached) scrolling by, then the pairs start getting words from that target language attached, then pan down to the open Bible again, with words spilling out of the computer onto the blank page, filling it faster than the hand and pen was.
 

...then that trained linguist could finish ten translations in the time it now takes him to do one. The software already exists to do the translation [flash BibleTrans screen shot], but we need that computer-readable representation of the Bible encoded in those concepts. Ten man-years to encode the New Testament, 40 or 50 for the whole Bible. It's a big job, and we need to pay competent people to do it. Then we get a thousand or more new translations in just a few years, for less than the cost to develop a new video game.


Zoom farther out to see the same computer feeding multiple Bibles, each in a different language. End up zooming out onto the rotating globe, with all these open Bibles over and around it.

First draft: 2014 September 22
Download/view it -- 2015 March 3