I stumbled across lolcats the other day - it's one of those internet phenomena like all your base and countless others.What particularly caught my attention was the bible translation project. It is set up like a wiki. People just login and translate a chunk whenever they want to, and subsequent readers correct and perfect where necessary.
I have no doubt that this will really piss some people off. The project includes acronyms like WTF and OMG which probably irks the more conservative of folks. It does treat the bible with a certain irreverence. There's a time in my life when it would've pissed me off. But I don't think that the goal of the project is to offend. Lolcats enthusiasts seem to be a pretty jovial and welcoming group, generally, and it seems like the project is good natured.
Pick out a couple of passages just to see. A lot of the more prevalent ones have been translated. It is really pretty impressive. It was fun to see a few of them, and it actually had me reading for a while just because I was so amused by how they interpreted different parts. Take 1 Corinthians 4:20, for example: usually written "The kingdom of God is not a matter of talk, but of power". I always liked the anti-bureaucrat message in that verse (probably just my youthful anarchistic slant, but still). Lolcats writes it "Teh kingdm of God iz less talk, more rokk."
I think there's more than a few lessons in Lolcats. The wiki-style bible is simply a cool idea. It could be applied more seriously(or more humorously) to different translations with different goals. It would potentially reflect a greater public consensus of interpretation than has ever been possible. It would easily maintain current and relevant language. And it would be an awesome collaborative project. I'm sure there's room for this outside of bible translation, too, it is just waiting to be discovered.
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