This book is intended to be used in courses or workshops for people involved in communicating Scripture across languages and cultures. The primary audience is Bible translators, but those who review translations and those who develop other Scriptures products will also find it helpful. Over the past thirty years, scholars have made significant advances in understanding how human communication functions. They have moved from looking for meaning in texts alone to seeing texts as providing clues that lead hearers to discover the speaker's intended meaning. Bible Translation Basics accomplishes two things: 1) it expresses these theoretical developments in communication at a basic level in non-technical language, and 2) it applies these developments to the task of Bible translation in very practical ways.