About

Project Barclay

This is the website for Project Barclay, an open-source endeavor to take the brilliant theological writings of 17th century Quakers and parse them for a modern audience.

Dynamic Equivalence, Not Paraphrasing

You may be wondering what “Thought-for-thought” means in the context of these works. This is a common description of “dynamic equivalence” translations, which attempt to translate the intent of each “thought” in the text, rather than going word-by-word. I include this phrase to differentiate the translation from a paraphrase, where the author makes a greater effort to interpret the meaning of the passage as a whole. As an example, the New International Version of the Bible is considered a dynamic equivalence translation, while “The Message” is a paraphrase. This project aims to translate one sentence at a time, maintaining the original structure, even at the occasional cost of clarity.

Open-Source

This is an open source project, and anyone can see the full source code, ask to contribute, or even fork the repository and continue the project as they see fit. All of this can be done through the Project Barclay Github Repository.