READING, England, April 3, 2002 — When church pastors in Laos received a delivery of the new Lao Common Language Bible, the man distributing them gave a moving description of the response. "We have had the joy of opening one box of the Bibles in front of two Lao church leaders," he wrote, "and saw the indescribable joy on their faces."
This is one example of the impact that Bible translation work continues to have on Christians the world over. The global total of languages in which books of the Bible are available has now reached 2,287. Translations of Scripture in 24 additional languages were registered with the United Bible Societies (UBS) during 2001.
The figures come in the annual Scripture Language Report, the 2001 edition of which is published this week by UBS. The report is based on Scriptures received over the past year in the libraries of the American Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. It gives the most up-to-date account available of all the languages and dialects in which the complete Bible, the New Testament and individual books have been published since the Gutenberg Bible, the first to be produced using movable type, appeared in 1455 or 1456.
The complete Bible has now been published in 392 languages, eight having been reported for the first time in the past year. Four of the eight are in African languages, two in Asian languages and two are in languages spoken in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. In addition, translations of Testaments have now been registered in 1,012 languages, compared with 987 at the end of 2000. The last-mentioned region claims the lion's share of new translations, with eight, Asian languages have seven and those of Africa have five.
For the first time, this year's statistics include details of progress in translating the Deuterocanon, widely used by Catholic and Orthodox churches.
The statistics do not provide a precise guide to Bible translation activity of the immediate past because the additions of the last 12 months have not necessarily been published during that time; they have simply been registered with one of the two official Bible Society deposit libraries. In fact, only about 40 per cent of the newly registered translations were actually published in 2001. A similar number were published in 2000 and most of the others within the preceding three years. One, however, appeared as long ago as 1989.
Meaningful
Year-to-year comparisons of the statistics are not always meaningful because the task of improving their accuracy is a continuing one, so the basis on which they are compiled varies slightly from one year to the next. Although the Scripture Language Report is compiled by UBS, the Scriptures it takes into account are translated and published by many different organisations.
There has been plentiful evidence over the past year of how much it means to someone to hold in their hands for the first time the Bible in their mother tongue. One leader said that to have the Old and New Testament in a single book was the answer to years of prayer.
A new translation into the language of a minority group also has an important role to play in establishing the claim of the group for their language and culture - which until then may have been dying out to be considered as alive and viable.
Reminder
For a small language community in particular the translation can act as a reminder that, although they may be few, God has not forgotten them. When Sweden launched the New Testament in Lule Sami, Bishop Rune Backlund, the chairman of the Swedish Bible Society, who conducted the service, praised the translators' achievement of enabling just 2,000 speakers to hear and read the Word of God in their mother tongue.
Blessing
Norway's Lule Sami population is even smaller. Asked why it was worth spending four million kroner (US$468,000) on producing a new translation for so few people, Anne Lisbeth Lagset, of the Norwegian Bible Society, replied, "Everyone is entitled to hear and read God's Word in his or her own language."
There are other kinds of blessing from a new translation, too. The common language Polish interconfessional New Testament and Psalms, launched in September, represented part of a joint effort by 11 churches and was hailed by Barbara Enholc-Narzynska, the General Secretary of the Bible Society in Poland, as a milestone in Polish ecumenical relations.
Peace
December's launch of the Bible in the Tzotzil language spoken by Mexico's Chamula people came after several decades of hostilities between those adhering to 'traditional' styles of Christian expression and believers who cannot agree with the practices these entail. The arrival of the new Tzotzil: Chamula Bible has, therefore, been hailed as an opportunity for reconciliation between what have been - literally - warring factions.
What such accounts show is that, valuable though the annual statistics are for rendering a broad picture of the worldwide state of Bible translation, there are a wealth of fascinating human interest stories to be found in the individual details.
A complete copy of the 2001 Scripture Language Report is available from the Communications Services Department of the UBS World Service Center, either by post or e-mail.
Source: United Bible Societies
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