Embraced by the Deaf community

Wycliffe Today Winter 2025 Edition

Amy Cruickshanks is a linguistics consultant with Bible Society Australia who played an integral role in creating the Auslan Alpha translation videos. Along with her desire to see Deaf communities equipped with resources to grow and share their faith, Amy has been part of the team translating the Bible into Auslan. Amy says that, prior to joining the project, she did not have connections with the Deaf community. Yet that all changed once she began learning the language and meeting the people with whom she would come to develop close relationships: 

Since I joined the team and started learning Auslan, I feel like my life has changed quite a bit. Now, some of my closest friends are Deaf people and others I have met through the Deaf community. It is also because of Auslan that I joined the church I am currently attending. The church has Auslan interpreting, so I thought I would visit to say hello and see what was happening there. I was really only intending to visit the church once, but the welcome I received that first Sunday was so warm and I was so readily embraced into the group of signers (made up of both Deaf and hearing) that I just kept going back. I’ve been there a year and a half now, and feel I have truly found my church family.    

Amy has been with the Auslan translation team for two years now, but notes that the Auslan Bible Project has been underway for almost 30 years. So what are some of the biggest challenges in a signed translation compared to a written or oral translation? Amy shares:

There are a few differences. I think the biggest one is that in Auslan, as in all signed languages, the visual details of objects and events are important and communicated, so these always need to be brought into consideration in translation work. For example, our team was recently translating Psalm 23, and we had a few discussions around the section ‘you anoint my head with oil’.  What did that anointing actually look like? Was it just a dab of oil on the forehead or was the oil liberally poured out and running down the face? These sorts of details aren’t something you typically have to consider in spoken language translations. 

Along with the challenges, Amy says she finds the Auslan translation work incredibly rewarding:

Being involved in this project has been the biggest gift from God to me. Not only is working with my teammates a joy, but together we have the opportunity to make the Bible more accessible to people who use Auslan as their first language – what could be better than that?

There are currently two full books of the Bible translated into Auslan (John and Acts) and portions of a number of other New and Old Testament books. While there is still a long way to go, Bible Society Australia recently launched a new, updated website for the Auslan Bible so that the Deaf community in Australia can better access what has already been translated. To see the Auslan Bible, visit https://auslan.bible/

Please pray:

• that God would continue to guide the Auslan Bible Project committee and the translation team
• for those who engage with the Auslan Bible and Alpha in Auslan – that they would grow in their understanding of how great God’s love for them is.