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Global Voices: Bible Translation

Global Voices is one of my favourite websites for news about the majority world. If you have an interest in what is going on outside of Europe and North America, you really should sign up to some of their news feeds. Today, in a somewhat of a break from their normal output, Global Voices has an excellent overview of Bible Translation. The article includes some great stories and video about the impact of the Bible as well as some discussion of the more missiological issues that I tend to raise here. Actually, most of the missiological stuff is taken from Kouya Chronicle. I was pleasantly surprised at how good some of it sounds!

Well done to Ayesha Saldanha for pulling together such an excellent article.

This week Christians (apart from those following the Julian calendar) will celebrate the birth of Jesus. Christianity appears in many forms around the world and has around 2.2 billion adherents. In this post we take a look at the blogs of the people trying to make sure Christian scripture can be understood in as many languages as possible – Bible translators.

According to the figures provided by one major Bible translation partnership, there are about 350 million people who do not have any of the Bible available in their own language, and there are currently more than 1,900 active translation projects. An “Audio Bible ministry” has recorded the New Testament in 500 languages – such as Chamacoco in Paraguay, Pangasinan in the Philippines, Bodo in India, and Kupsabiny in Uganda. In the Peruvian Amazon, a group of tribal churches is working on translating the Bible into native languages. In Ethiopia a local church is involved in Bible translation projects within the country, and in sending missionaries to Asia and to other parts of Africa.

Go on and read the whole thing. It is well worth it.