No Colored Pencils Required
Above: Five Kinga children in Makete, Tanzania. Jonathan McCall, a JAARS-trained vernacular media specialist, used the Dramatizer while recording Ruth and Jonah in their language, which is spoken by roughly 140,000 Tanzanians.
A rainbowed New Testament lay before him—27 books saturated, line by line, with cryptic colored-pencil scrawls.
Zechariah and the angel Gabriel sported vibrant scribbles; Mary and Elizabeth donned their own waxy hues. The Pharisees, too, boasted precise bursts of color.
After six weeks, translator Keith Forster was finished: he’d manually color-coded the entire San Blas Kuna New Testament of Panama, creating a script for dramatized audio recordings.
He prayed no one would have to follow in his footsteps.
An Arduous Beginning
Keith’s script was used by the nonprofit Faith Comes By Hearing to produce a multivoiced, dramatic recording of Scriptures in a minority language—for one of the first times in history. While the resulting cassettes were widely successful, creating a script had been arduous; after the New Testament was color-coded in pencil, Keith spent countless hours creating an electronic version.
Such a daunting task, he feared, would prohibit others from even considering audio Scriptures.
For months afterward, Keith pondered: How could others create effective scripts without the difficulties and time I invested? Surely, it could be accomplished without a grown man wielding colored pencils—yet Keith lacked the computer know-how to create a solution himself.
Enter Jim Albright, a JAARS computer programmer who hates boring tasks.
The pair crossed paths in the late 1990s, when Jim and his wife, Barbe, stayed with the Forster family while visiting their son in Dallas. Keith posed the idea of a computer program that could create recording scripts from translated New Testaments, and Jim immediately hopped onboard.
“I knew Jim to be a very capable computer programmer,” remembers Keith. “He was passionate about Bible translation and always ready to ‘go for it’ when it came to innovation. He was just the man for the job.”
Years later, it seems Keith’s initial impression was spot on.
From Research to Release
Because the project was outside his normal workload, Jim began creating the program, later named Dramatizer, while on vacation. He spent two years designing the first version—studying the quotation style of various Bible translations, gathering input from Keith and Faith Comes By Hearing, attending a recording session, creating a user-friendly interface and so on.
Barbe spent a year identifying the speaker for every direct quote in the Bible, excluding Psalms and Proverbs. She and Jim worked alongside Keith to tackle complexities such as:
- If one voice reads for several minor characters, how can Dramatizer ensure his or her voice isn’t used for two different characters within a short period of time?
- How will the program handle passages that have been converted from indirect to direct speech during Scripture translation?
- How can Dramatizer guarantee the same voice is used for parallel passages in the four Gospels, even if the characters aren’t explicitly named in each book?
- Who speaks “I am the Alpha and the Omega” in Revelation 1:8 and 22:13, God or Jesus?
Month after month, the team continued—relying heavily on prayer. “Without God’s answered prayers for wisdom and strength,” reflects Jim, “and without our prayer and financial partners, this project would never have gotten off the ground.”
An Open-Source Solution
The resulting program, available for free download, can be used with any translation of the New Testament that is in electronic form and has a consistently marked quote system. Dramatizer automatically marks the speaker for 95% of spoken passages; the remaining 5%, which include multiple speakers within one verse, can be marked by hand in a few hours.
Users can then print customized scripts for each voice, as well as master scripts for the director and recording engineer. Dramatizer also integrates with several recording programs to organize the hundreds or thousands of audio files created.
Today, the program is being used by translators and vernacular media specialists, mostly in Africa, to help bring God’s Word to life on cassettes and digital audio players. It is also being used by SIM, a Christian mission organization, to record the Old Testament in Guaraní, a language spoken by more than 4.6 million people in Paraguay.
By using Dramatizer, these personnel are able to create a script within hours, not weeks—no colored pencils required.
