Cotonou, Benin · August 10–13, 2026
Francophone Africa Conference of OBT Consultants

A translation consultant is the last gate. Before a book of the Bible is released in a language, a consultant sits with the team and works through it — testing whether the meaning survived, whether the phrasing lands, whether anything has quietly gone wrong. Nothing gets published until they sign off.

Fifty of them, responsible for oral Bible translation across francophone Africa, were in the room in Cotonou in August.

The recommendation that came out of the afternoon was not about translators. It was about the consultants themselves: they need training in the principles and quality assurance of translating the Psalms. The report calls it urgent, and gives the reason plainly — a large number of the consultants present had not yet had occasion to work on a poetic text at all.

Roughly a third of the Bible is poetry. These are experienced professionals; several have been checking translations for decades. The poetic books simply had not reached their desks yet, because in most projects the Psalms come late — after the Gospels, after the narratives, after everything that behaves like prose.

Which means the gate is about to open on material no one has been trained to check. A consultant who has spent a career testing whether a sentence means what it should has a well-developed instinct for accuracy and no particular instrument for form. When the text in front of them turns on rhythm, on parallel lines, on a deliberate silence, the old instrument gives a confident reading that misses most of what is there.

The consultants asked for the training themselves. That is the part worth noticing: the request came from the people who needed the training, before anyone had to raise it.