David & Lynn Frank

David and Lynn Frank joined Wycliffe in 1982 when Lynn had completed her MA and David was finishing his PhD in linguistics. In early 1984 they moved to the island of Saint Lucia, where they served full-time for nearly 17 years and where their three children were born and raised. The language spoken in Saint Lucia is French Creole, and the Franks worked on translation, linguistics and literacy. With the Saint Lucian Creole New Testament published in 1999, the Frank family moved to the U.S. at the end of 2000 and made their new home in Waxhaw, North Carolina.

The second phase of David and Lynn's career began when they were asked to lead the Gullah New Testament translation to completion, which had been started many years earlier. With regular trips to the South Carolina Lowcountry, they reassembled the Sea Island Translation Team, and the Gullah New Testament was published in 2005.

The last stage of the Franks' career focused on consulting, teaching, writing and editing. The Franks began serving as Bible translation consultants in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, and a few years later, the same in Nigeria. Lynn began editing academic publications in translation and linguistics for SIL. For a dozen years, David was editor of the Journal of Translation. The two of them helped, as consultants, bring about the completion of three New Testament translations in Nigeria. Then they were brought 'back to the Americas, to work on the translation of the Old Testament into a cluster of three Caribbean English Creoles, including Jamaican, Belize Kriol and Islander Creole (Colombia).