Within the next 15 years every spoken language in the world will have the Bible translated into its own tongue. This is because of new technological advances as well as translation strategies.
The world’s largest Scripture translation organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, believes that the Bible will be translated into all of the remaining 2,200 languages used by some 350 million people by 2025. There are about 6,905 languages spoken in the world.
The man who is responsible for raising the $1 billion needed for the effort, called the Last Languages Campaign, believes God will provide people and money to finally finish the more than 2,000-year effort.
“By God’s provision we went through a financial crisis and during the very same year as the financial crisis we have our greatest year ever in the number of translations started,” said Paul Edwards, executive director of Wycliffe’s Last Language Campaign, when speaking to The Christian Post recently.
“Apparently, God is less worried about the money and He is more worried about his Word getting out.”
Since its launch, the Last Languages Campaign has received a total commitment of $184 million.
Edwards said many factors are contributing to the rapid speed of Bible translation over the past few years.
New computer software allows translators to fairly accurately predict the rest of a paragraph after they enter a few phonetic words. Also a small, battery-powered satellite and a laptop enables a translator to check his translator with a master translator somewhere in the world with little effort. Both these advancements save a tremendous amount of time.
Finally, Wycliffe is also using a new approach with translation by having teams translate groups or clusters of similar languages at the same time. Many translation teams worldwide are working on five to 12 similar languages at the same time so if one language group receives a Gospel story so do the other similar language groups. This change in approach should also see Bibles being translated into new languages more quickly.
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