Volunteers Create "EasyEnglish" Bible Materials

Wycliffe Associates (WA) UK, a Christian volunteer organization that serves at home to help Wycliffe and other missions overseas, is offering on-line Bible commentaries and other material in simplified English.

Through its EasyEnglish (EE) Web site, WA provides the free resources to pastors, mother-tongue Bible translators, speakers of English as a second language and people with learning difficulties.

EasyEnglish coordinator Martin Lloyd says the site (www.easyenglish.info) attracts 1,700 visitors per day from 140 countries. They download such resources as Bible commentaries, translators' helps, Bible study questions, and semantically analyzed Bible texts.

"These materials are a greater help than silver and gold," said someone from Malawi, after using the EasyEnglish book of Esther at a seminar in that African country.

EasyEnglish materials are produced by a steadily growing team of more than 100 volunteers, including writers, translators, qualified linguistic and theological checkers, and editors.

WA spent years researching the methodology of writing simplified forms of English, before developing EasyEnglish. It has two levels of vocabulary: one for people learning English as a foreign language and another for those who speak English as a second or foreign language.