The British and Foreign Bible Society, often known in England and Wales as simply the Bible Society, is a non-denominational Christian Bible society with charity status whose purpose is to make the Bible available throughout the world.
A metrical psalter is a kind of Bible translation: a book containing a verse translation of all or part of the Book of Psalms in vernacular poetry, meant to be sung as hymns in a church. Some metrical psalters include melodies or harmonisations. The composition of metrical psalters was a large enterprise of the Protestant Reformation, especially in its Calvinist manifestation.
Parts of the Bible have been translated into Welsh since at least the 15th century, but the most widely used translation of the Bible into Welsh for several centuries was the 1588 translation by William Morgan, Y Beibl cyssegr-lan sef Yr Hen Destament, a'r Newydd as revised in 1620. The Beibl Cymraeg Newydd was published in 1988 and revised in 2004. Beibl.net is a translation in colloquial Welsh which was completed in 2013.
A Bible society is a non-profit organization, usually nondenominational in makeup, devoted to translating, publishing, and distributing the Bible at affordable prices. In recent years they also are increasingly involved in advocating its credibility and trustworthiness in contemporary cultural life. Traditionally Bible society editions contain scripture, without any doctrinal notes or comments, although they may include non-sectarian notes on alternate translations of words, or variations in the different available manuscripts.
Bible translations into Chinese include translations of the whole or parts of the Bible into any of the levels and varieties of the Chinese language. The first translations may have been made as early as the 7th century AD, but the first printed translations appeared only in the nineteenth century. Progress on a modern translation was encumbered by denominational rivalries, theological clashes, linguistic disputes, and practical challenges at least until the publication of the Protestant Chinese Union Version in 1919, which became the basis of standard versions in use today.
A Protestant Bible is a Christian Bible whose translation or revision was produced by Protestants. Such Bibles comprise 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament for a total of 66 books. Some Protestants use Bibles which also include 14 additional books in a section known as the Apocrypha bringing the total to 80 books. This is often contrasted with the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, which includes seven deuterocanonical books as a part of the Old Testament. The division between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books is not accepted by all Protestants who simply view books as being canonical or not and therefore classify books found in the deuterocanon, along with other books, as part of the Apocrypha.
The complete Bible has been translated into three of the dialects of Inupiat language, the New Testament in two more and portions in another.
Translations of the Bible into Irish were first printed and published in the 17th century: the New Testament in 1602, the Old Testament in 1685, and the entire Bible in 1690.
Until the 1990s, most Korean Bible translations used old-fashioned, antiquated language. This made it difficult for Christians that preferred colloquial terms to comprehend what the Bible said. By the 1990s, more colloquial and contemporary versions of the Korean Bible translations came about for Christians, which made it easier for them to comprehend and understand the words from the Bible in a more precise way.
The royal Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander is an illuminated manuscript Gospel Book in middle Bulgarian, prepared and illustrated in 1355–1356 for Tsar Ivan Alexander of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The manuscript is regarded as one of the most important manuscripts of medieval Bulgarian culture. The manuscript, now in the British Library, contains the text of the Four Gospels illustrated with 366 miniatures and consists of 286 parchment folios, 33 by 24.3 cm in size.
Bible translations into Persian have been made since the fourth or fifth century, although few early manuscripts survive. There are both Jewish and Christian translations from the Middle Ages. Complete translations of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament from original languages were first made in the 19th century by Protestant missionaries.
Biblical translations into the indigenous languages of North and South America have been produced since the 16th century.
The Bible, or portions of it, have been translated into over 1,000 languages of Africa. Many of these are indexed by the Forum of Bible Agencies, Find.Bible site and available online in text and audio form, as print on demand versions, or through churches and book sellers. This effort continues. Not all are (yet) listed below.
The Bible was translated into the Manx language, a Gaelic language related to Irish and Scots Gaelic, in the 17th and 18th centuries.
To date, the Bible has not been completely translated into Lowland Scots. In 1513-39 Murdoch Nisbet, associated with a group of Lollards, wrote a Scots translation of the New Testament, working from John Purvey's Wycliffite Bible. However, this work remained unpublished, in manuscript form, and was known only to his family and Bible scholars. It was published by the Scottish Text Society in 1901–5. The first direct translation of a book of the Bible from one of the original languages, rather than a pre-existing English model was Peter Hately Waddell's The Psalms: frae Hebrew intil Scottis, published in 1871.
The New Testament was first published in Scottish Gaelic in 1767 and the whole Bible was first published in 1801. Prior to these, Gaels in Scotland had used translations into Irish.
The history of all Bible translations into Slavic languages begins with Bible translations into Church Slavonic. Other languages include:
The Hakka Bible: Today's Taiwan Hakka Version (TTHV), is the most recent revised Hakka language translation of the Bible used by Hakka Protestants in Taiwan and overseas Hakka communities. Work on the translation commenced in 1984 with the TTHV New Testament & Psalms completed in 1993, Proverbs was published separately in 1995. The entire Bible was made available on April 11, 2012 at the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan's annual General Assembly meeting. An ecumenical dedication and thanksgiving ceremony was held on April 22, 2012 at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu with over 1,200 Hakka Christians in attendance.
Bible translations into Malay include translations of the whole or parts of the Bible into any of the levels and varieties of the Malay language. Publication of early or partial translations began as early as the seventeenth century although there is evidence that the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, translated religious texts that included Bible verses into Malay as early as the sixteenth century.
