Colburn Family

In addition to leading the OCMC liturgical translation team, Dr. Michael is developing Doxa, the next-generation of liturgical software and working on a handbook for translators of the canons of Theophany.

Michael served as a missionary with the Wycliffe Bible Translators for 13 years, living and working with the Ogea tribe of Papua New Guinea on a project to translate the New Testament into the Ogea language. This required his learning Ogea without the benefit of a written grammar or dictionary. He devised an alphabet for the Ogea language and taught people to read and write using the new alphabet. He trained Ogea speakers as “mother-tongue” translators and provided consultation and review of their translation throughout the process.

After returning to the US, he worked 24 years as a full-time software developer and program manager for the US Government.

He and his wife, Lisa, now work full-time with the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC). Their vision is that every Orthodox Christian parish in the world will have the opportunity to worship God using the mother-tongue of its parishioners. Their mission is to equip translators of the Orthodox liturgical texts with the knowledge and tools they need to produce accurate and understandable translations that speak to the hearts of those who pray, hear, or read them. To that end, Michael has laid out a multi-year plan to develop and provide four types of assistance to OCMC missionaries, liturgical translators, and publishers of translations: software, courses, handbooks, and consulting.

Working with Fr Seraphim Dedes, Michael developed AGES Liturgical Workbench (ALWB). This software has tools for translators, a multi-lingual library, typikon templates, and a rubrics engine. The rubrics engine calculates the liturgical properties for a given date (e.g. the tone of the week, what day of Lent it is, what feast day it is, etc), in order to generate services for specific dates , automatically determining and inserting the variable hymns. Fr. Seraphim uses ALWB to create liturgical services and books for Digital Chant Stand. After developing ALWB, Michael created the Online Liturgical Workstation, OLW, that provides tools for liturgical translators and researchers. OLW allows users to generate liturgical services or books with one, two, or three languages side-by-side. It has tools to create notes about words and phrases in the liturgical text and grammatical information.

The current software focus is on the development of Doxa, which combines the features of ALWB and OLW into a single software program.  The goals of Doxa are ease of use and increased speed.  An example of a website generated by Doxa can be viewed here.

In addition to software, Michael works on a liturgical translator's handbook for the Hymns of Theophany. The handbook uses a form of English that should be more easily understood by people who have learned English as a foreign language. The handbook provides a grammatical analysis of the Greek text, model translations, and commentary that explains the meaning of the text, identifies potential translation problems, and provides suggestions on how these problems can be solved. In the first half of 2019, Michael tested features of the translator's handbook in Kenya, Alaska, and Korea. He found that use of a liturgical translator's handbook reduces the number of errors, improving quality. After defending his research before a committee of seven professors, he was awarded a Doctor of Theology Degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.  He also has degrees in Biblical Studies, Linguistics, and Computer Science.

The Colburns are  based in the United States and from there travel to Kenya and other countries to train people in the use of the liturgical Software. They assist the Archdiocese of Kenya in its translation needs.

Upcoming Events

Join Our Mailing List