I know John's comments were intended to be private, but the point is that now they're not. And while he was intending to make a fairly specific point, the comments might have been taken by some with broader implications than might have been intended. So, I'm going to grab the soapbox for a moment to offer some more perspective. [I'm sure most people here are aware that I was until recently representing SIL.]
Anybody can learn about SIL's involvement in support of Bible Translation and the fact that SIL is a Christian organization have from the SIL web site: these things are clear from the "What is..." page, http://www.sil.org/sil/ (this page is linked from the home page). SIL's involvement in Bible translation is not always widely advertised for various reasons: it is not the only work that SIL is involved in, not all SIL projects involve Bible translation, and in some countries in which SIL works the national agencies (government ministry, university,...) that sponsor SIL's work may not want that aspect of the work to be highlighted. But the connection with work in Bible translation has never been a secret. There is a close relationship between SIL and Wycliffe Bible Translators, though they are distinct organizations: WBT is the organization that has the primary role in finding resources to enable the work of SIL. Most, but not all, monies for SIL's work are raised by WBT; other monies come from many other sources, including grants from secular or governmental agencies. Most, but not all, SIL personnel are seconded from one of several Wycliffe organizations from countries around the world on all continents. The Executive VP of SIL is also EVP of WBT, and the two organizations share a common set of values, though the goals of the two organizations are distinct, just as the two organizations are distinct. I'm sure there are some very wealthy evangelical Christian sponsors that, via WBT, back the work of SIL. Most large non-profit agencies have some very wealthy sponsors, and being a Christian organization, one should expect there to be wealthy Christian sponsors. (And, as Peter Kirk observed, the wealthiness does not extend to SIL's workers; I can corroborate that.) SIL has had some ideological enemies over the years, but I think only those with strongly biased positions would refuse to acknowledge the positive contribution SIL has made to the benefit of linguistic minorities, to nations, and to the field of linguistics. SIL has been responsible for development of national literacy and bilingual education in various countries. They have been given honours for their work by various national governments. Many authors in the field of linguistics have observed that no other organization has done as much to document and preserve languages around the world. I hope I can give a fair assessment in saying that SIL has also made a not insignificant contribution to getting the writing systems of the world's languages, particularly those that are lesser known, supported in computer systems and in industry standards. Contributions in these respects have gone on for at least two decades have included: - DOS-based tools for working with custom character sets, including design of bitmaps and output on displays and printers, design of input methods, customizable sorting, general text processes and text-data conversion - the Encore Fonts system, which allowed easy development of TTF font instances supporting custom Latin, Cyrillic and symbol character sets from a sizeable glyph library with several faces - the Fonts in Cyberspace Web site - tools for development of input methods for Windows (SIL members offered significant input and support in the development of the Keyman input method creation/management system from Tavultesoft) - the SILKey input method development system for Mac OS - tools for font development - the TECkit encoding conversion system for Windows and Mac OS -- the only customizable tool I know of that can be adapted for conversion of thousands of legacy encodings used around the world to and from Unicode, particularly where legacy encodings have utilized presentation form encodings - the Graphite complex-script font technology - promotion of the Unicode standard, and contribution to the development of Unicode and other related industry standards that facilitate multilingual computing - advocacy to industry of the needs of writing systems from the world's lesser-known languages - development of fonts for many different scripts, supporting literally thousands of the world's languages All of these efforts have been funded by SIL for the benefit of the world's language communities; almost all of these resources have been made readily available at no cost to user communities; and all with no preference or bias based on religion, race or nationality of the user communities. So, if someone has a quality font for one of the less-well-supported scripts of the world (or even one of the better-supported ones) and is considering donating it to SIL so that it can be made more widely and readily available, I think that is something that could certainly bring benefit to peoples around the world, without regard to religion or any other distinguishing traits. Peter Constable
