Wow, Who Knew? Fonts are Needed for Bible Translation?

from an article posted by Annie Olsen and Martin Raymond

 

Such was the reaction of an American pastor upon hearing that font development was the ministry focus of Annie Olsen, a type designer for SIL International. It’s not an uncommon reaction, either, at least among people who speak English (written with just 26 unaccented letters of the Latin script) as their native language. A fully developed digital font—a set of letters and symbols, plus underlying instructions—enables a computer or other device to print a script properly on a page or display it on a screen.

Then what, exactly, is a script?

A script in this context is a system of symbols used for writing. The more than 7,000 living languages of the world use over 140 different scripts today. You’re reading here the English language written using Latin (or Roman) script. Latin script is also used for thousands of other languages, though often with some modifications such as diacritics (accents or other marks) or slightly different letter shapes. You may also be familiar with other scripts such as Chinese, Hebrew, Greek or Arabic, recognizing their appearance even if you can’t read them.
In our modern age, computers—and thus, fonts—play a crucial role in enabling people from every people group and nation to have access to God’s Word in the language and script they know best. SIL International’s Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI) team was formed to address the technical challenges encountered when using different languages and scripts on computers.
In some parts of the world, just using the correct script is not enough; the style of the script is also really important. The Arabic script, for instance, has several distinct styles of writing used in different parts of the world. The illustration below right shows a style of Arabic writing commonly found in West Africa. On the left is the same text printed using SIL’s Arabic script font, Scheherazade, which is designed to match the standard (or Naskh) form of Arabic.
For people used to reading the West African style of Arabic, Scriptures printed using the Scheherazade font would look “foreign” to them, even if the language was correct. They would also find it harder to read because of the difference in style. For years this was a problem for Bible publishers in that region, since there was no suitable font available to them.

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