OT: Bible Translations and Native Speakers

Rosie Perera

Very interesting chart showing the relationship between number of Bible translations in various languages and number of native speakers of that language.

Source (with complete article discussing it): http://thesecondeclectic.blogspot.ca/2013/06/bible-translations-and-native-speakers.html

Unix

So there no other languages than English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian that have an adequate amount of translations?! I thought there were more German translations, 9 is not that many considering the amount of speakers.

Half a dozen translations is very few IMO. That's what we have over here, although we have only 9 million inhabitants so, all of whom don't even speak our language ...
And most of the young people over here know English adequately but despite that I guess they use the Bible in the local language.

Our newest Bible is from 1999 but we still don't have an old testament that takes into account the Qumran finds, I guess this is because the work for the 1999 Bible began in the '70s (work on the NT began in the '60s and a preliminary NT was released in 1981 together with a light modernization of just the language of the 1917 translation OT).

The newest Bible in our language is a modernization of the language of an 18th century Lutheran Bible and translation from the Textus Receptus. The OT is not finished yet but they are working on it. There's also a forthcoming Roman-Catholic whole Bible (a modification of the 1999 Bible), the first since the early 16th century when a NT was released.

So it will take some decades yet before we have a Bible that uses the Qumran finds.

Note that Jehova's Witness Bibles are included in the numbers!

David Thomas

I would expect that once functional translations are available (driven by missional priorities) additional translations are only printed according to market research (driven by economic priorities). In other words, are there enough of the 836,000,000 Mandarin speakers who want to purchase a translation that is not yet available?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/494596#Comment_494596

So there no other languages than English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian that have an adequate amount of translations?

Isn't one translation adequate if it is a very good translation with footnotes?[:)]

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/494596#Comment_494596

So there no other languages than English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian that have an adequate amount of translations?!

Dutch seems to also have an adequate number of translations. And there are probably others further to the right of where the chart cuts off arbitrarily (3 translations or 2 translations) that are probably just fine for languages where there are fewer speakers. If they are good and recent translations, that's better than none. There are hundreds of other languages not mentioned that the Bible has been translated into, sometimes only the New Testament. It is an ongoing goal to get the Bible translated into as many languages as possible, but the reality is that it costs money to do, and for languages where there are only a few thousand speakers it is not likely to be done in the next couple of decades. Also, many people around the world speak a second language in addition to their native language, so if the Bible is translated into the major language of their country even if it's not translated into the language of their own people group, that is considered a significant achievement by Bible translators.