There are more than seven thousand living languages in the world. Some are spoken by hundreds of millions of people, others by a few hundred. For most of history, Bible translation reached only a small fraction of them. In the twentieth century that changed. Translation became a deliberate, organised and increasingly professional effort to reach every language, and in recent decades it has become, above all, the work of speakers of those languages themselves.

This article describes how that happened, the organisations involved, and the questions the effort still raises.

Cameron Townsend and Camp Wycliffe

The story usually begins with William Cameron Townsend (1896–1982), a young American who went to Guatemala in 1917 to sell Spanish Bibles. Most of the people he met spoke Mayan languages, not Spanish. In a story Townsend often told, a Kaqchikel man asked him why, if his God was so great, he could not speak their language. Whether or not the words were exactly those, the experience redirected his life. Townsend learned Kaqchikel and, with Kaqchikel colleagues, completed a New Testament around 1929.

Townsend became convinced that the work needed trained linguists. In 1934 he and the Bible teacher L. L. Legters opened Camp Wycliffe, a summer course in a farmhouse in Arkansas, with just two students the first year. It was named after John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century English translator (see John Wycliffe and the first English Bible). Among its early students were Kenneth Pike and Eugene Nida, who both became leading linguists.

By 1942 Townsend’s work had become two organisations: the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which conducted language research and literacy work, often under agreements with governments and universities, and Wycliffe Bible Translators, which raised support and spoke to churches. The arrangement allowed the same people to work as linguists in countries that would not welcome missionaries. Critics, especially in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, saw this as a blurring of roles and accused SIL of serving outside political interests; supporters pointed to its large contribution to the documentation of little-known languages. Both views have their historians.

SIL also publishes Ethnologue, the most widely used catalogue of the world’s languages, which counts more than seven thousand living languages.

The United Bible Societies and Eugene Nida

The nineteenth-century Bible societies continued their work (see Bible societies and missionary translators). In 1946, at a meeting at Haywards Heath in England, national societies joined to form the United Bible Societies (UBS), to coordinate translation, publishing and distribution worldwide.

The most influential figure in Bible translation of the century worked in this world. Eugene A. Nida (1914–2011) spent most of his career with the American Bible Society and the UBS. He travelled to dozens of countries to advise translators and wrote books that shaped not only Bible translation but the academic study of translation in general, especially Toward a Science of Translating (1964) and, with Charles Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969). His idea of “dynamic equivalence”, translating so that the meaning comes across naturally rather than reproducing the form, is discussed in Word for word or meaning for meaning?.

The UBS also produced tools for translators: a Greek New Testament edited with translators’ needs in mind (first edition 1966), handbooks on each book of the Bible, and later software. After the Second Vatican Council, the UBS and the Vatican agreed Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible (1968, revised 1987), and many translations since have been made by Catholics and Protestants together.

From missionaries to mother-tongue translators

The biggest change of the last fifty years is not in organisations but in who translates. In the nineteenth century the translator was usually a foreign missionary, with native speakers as helpers. Today most Bible translation is done by mother-tongue translators, people translating into their own first language, often trained in biblical languages and linguistics, with consultants who check the work for accuracy.

A typical project now involves a team from the language community, a consultant, and many rounds of checking. One common method is back-translation: someone translates the draft back into a language the consultant knows, so that the consultant can see what the draft actually says. Drafts are tested with ordinary readers to see whether they understand them as intended. Many projects are now led by local churches and national organisations rather than by agencies from Europe or North America.

How many languages have the Bible?

For many years the Wycliffe Global Alliance published annual statistics on Scripture access, compiled with the UBS, SIL and other partners. It has since scaled back its own calculations and points readers to ProgressBible, a shared database that is updated monthly. The figures change as projects finish and as counts are corrected, so they should be read as approximate.

The Alliance’s 2024 report, using data from September 2023, put the situation roughly like this:

  • 756 languages had a complete Bible;
  • 1,726 more had a New Testament;
  • 1,274 more had some smaller portion of Scripture;
  • and the rest of the world’s roughly seven thousand languages, more than three thousand of them, had no Scripture at all, though translation work was under way in many of them, and the Alliance counted 985 languages still needing a translation to begin.

Numbers like these need care. A language with a complete Bible may have only an old version that few can read. A language with no Scripture may be spoken by a small community that mostly uses a regional language. And statistics cannot show whether a translation is good, or whether it is used. Still, they show both how much has been done and how much remains.

In 1999 Wycliffe organisations adopted a goal, often called Vision 2025, of seeing a translation project begun in every language that needed one by 2025. That goal helped speed up work, especially through partnerships and new technology. How close it came depends on how languages are counted and what counts as “needing” a translation, and the annual statistics are the best guide to where things stand.

Sign languages

Sign languages are full languages, with their own grammar, not signed versions of spoken languages. There are some hundreds of them, and Bible translation into them has grown quickly. Because sign languages are visual, the translation is filmed rather than printed. In 2020 the organisation Deaf Missions reported completing the whole Bible in American Sign Language, after decades of work, generally described as the first complete Bible in any sign language. Work is under way in many other sign languages, most led by Deaf translators.

Open licences

For most of the twentieth century, translations were owned by the organisations that made them, and permission was needed to print, record or adapt them. That remains common, and copyright helps pay for the work. But a movement has grown up to release translation resources under open licences.

Examples include unfoldingWord and its Door43 platform, which publish Bible texts, translation notes and training materials under Creative Commons licences so that local churches can translate and publish without asking permission, and eBible.org, which gathers freely licensed and public domain translations. Bible societies have built shared digital libraries of their own, with permissions managed centrally. Supporters of open licensing argue that it removes barriers for the poorest churches; others worry about quality control, or about losing the income that sustains long projects. Both concerns are real.

Debates that continue

Translators still argue about many questions: how far to adapt expressions to a culture, how to translate key terms where a word for “God” carries other religious meanings, how to render “Father” and “Son” for readers from Muslim backgrounds (the subject of a major controversy in the early 2010s, reviewed by a World Evangelical Alliance panel), and how to use computers and, now, artificial intelligence without weakening human checking. These are not new questions; they are the oldest questions of translation in new settings.

Where Open Word Bible fits

Open Word Bible is not a minority-language project. Its languages so far are English, Spanish, French and Swahili, all of which already have many Bibles. But it shares two concerns with the modern movement. Its CC0 licence means anyone, including translators into other languages, may use and adapt it freely. And because every sentence carries its reasoning (see Showing our work: what a reasoning record is), a translator into another language can see what was decided about the Greek and Hebrew, not only an English result. Its drafts are AI-assisted, and none is yet marked reviewed; like every project described here, it depends on human checkers whose names are recorded.

Sources

  • Svelmoe, William Lawrence. A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith Missions, 1896–1945. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008.
  • Nida, Eugene A. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill, 1964.
  • Nida, Eugene A., and Charles R. Taber. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: Brill, 1969.
  • Stine, Philip C. Let the Words Be Written: The Lasting Influence of Eugene A. Nida. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.
  • Robertson, Edwin H. Taking the Word to the World. 1996.
  • Wilt, Timothy, ed. Bible Translation: Frames of Reference. Manchester: St Jerome, 2003.
  • Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas: SIL International, published annually.
  • Wycliffe Global Alliance. “2024 Global Scripture Access.” Online at wycliffe.net, with later updates from ProgressBible (progress.bible).
  • Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.