The Gateway Languages Strategy equips the global church with open-licensed content, tools, and training in about 50 Languages of Wider Communication that cover the church through multilingualism. A majority language is a Gateway Language only when the church needs it as a Language of Wider Communication. Churches bilingual in a gateway language then translate into their own languages. The strategy answers two obstacles: resources available only in English, and licenses that restrict who may use, translate, adapt, or redistribute them.
The Gateway Languages Strategy: equip the global church with the content, tools, and training needed for Bible translation and for creating theologically sound biblical resources, by providing them under open licenses and collaborating with church networks to translate them into the ~50 Languages of Wider Communication that cover the global church through multilingualism.
Tim Jore, The Gateway Languages Strategy (2017), executive summary.
Gateway languages (GLs) are the smallest number of Languages of Wider Communication that covers 100% of the languages spoken collectively by the people groups of the world through patterns of multilingualism. In practice the strategy names about 50 such languages. A majority language is a Gateway Language only when the church needs it as a Language of Wider Communication.
Other languages (OLs): in the Gateway Languages strategy, all languages that are not considered gateway languages. Not a synonym for “minority languages.”
In 2001 a people group in Papua New Guinea decided they were not going to wait any longer for a missionary to translate the Bible into their language. They had asked for help more than ten years before, but no help had come. The church in that people group began translating the Bible into their own language.
They met two obstacles:
Churches that are ready to translate still meet those same two obstacles: the training, exegetical resources, and tools needed to translate with excellence are available only in English, and licenses on those resources restrict who may use, translate, adapt, and redistribute them.
The remaining need includes more than languages with no Scripture: revisions, unfinished projects, other scripts and cultural forms, dialects, audio, and complete Bibles rather than New Testaments only. Across formats, the remaining need “could easily be in excess of 10,000” (The Gateway Languages Strategy, 2017).
In most places, multilingualism is ordinary: some members of a church understand a Language of Wider Communication. If the church has unrestricted content, tools, and training in that language, it can use them and then translate into its own.
A majority language is a gateway language only when the church needs it as a Language of Wider Communication to cover other languages through multilingualism, even if it has many speakers and high prestige. If the church can translate from an existing Gateway Language, it does not need another.
Gateway Language | Other language | |
|---|---|---|
What it is | One of about 50 Languages of Wider Communication that cover the church through multilingualism | Any language that is not a Gateway Language |
Who translates into it | Church networks, from open-licensed content, tools, and training | The church bilingual in a Gateway Language, translating into its own language |
unfoldingWord’s part | Make unrestricted resources available in the GLs | Not to do the other-language translation |
The work has three movements:
unfoldingWord helps with the first two movements by making open content and tools available in Gateway Languages. The church that is bilingual in a Gateway Language translates, checks, and owns the other-language work; unfoldingWord does not do that translation. See how churches translate for the practical sequence.
The first stage takes time and capital, because creating content, building tools, and translating them into about fifty Gateway Languages is slow, expensive work. The aim is forming capacity in the church so the church can translate.
Open licenses and Gateway Language resources give the church what it needs to translate with excellence and to check what it produces, but a draft still needs checking, and the strategy requires training in translation principles and mature leadership in the church.
If no church yet exists, evangelism and church planting come first, and an outside-in approach may still be fitting since God has used that work. English-only, restricted resources cannot equip the church that is already translating. Church-Centric Bible Translation names the larger aim: establishing the church, with translation as a means.
Original content © unfoldingWord, CC BY-SA 4.0. Last reviewed 27 August 2026.