David and Lynn Frank joined Wycliffe in 1982 when Lynn had completed her MA and David was finishing his PhD in linguistics. They moved to the field in early 1984, to the island of Saint Lucia, where they lived and worked full-time for nearly 17 years, and where their three children were born and lived their early years. 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 their career began when in 2002 the Franks were asked to lead the Gullah New Testament translation to completion, which had been started many years earlier. Working out of the JAARS Center and with regular trips to the South Carolina Lowcountry, they reassembled the Sea Island Translation team, and the Gullah New Testament was published in 2005.

With their children now grown, and while continuing to stay involved with Gullah, the present stage of David and Lynn's career is focused on consulting, teaching, writing, and editing. In 2009 they began serving as Bible translation consultants in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, and in addition since 2014 have been doing the same thing in Nigeria, making several trips a year to do consulting. David has been the editor of the Journal of Translation since 2007, and in 2008 Lynn began editing academic publications in translation and linguistics for SIL.