According to Wycliffe Global Alliance (WGA) (@WycliffeGA), the Bible has now been trans­lated into more than 3,200 lan­guages.

[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Wycliffe Associates—Helping to Translate the Bible Where Persecution of Christians Is Severe: An Interview with Bruce Smith]

While at least 1.5 bil­lion peo­ple still don’t have the full Bible avail­able in their first lan­guage, more than 684 mil­lion of these have the New Tes­ta­ment; oth­ers have por­tions or at least some level of trans­la­tion or prepara­tory work begun. And there’s known ac­tive trans­la­tion and/or lin­guis­tic de­vel­op­ment hap­pen­ing in 2,400 lan­guages across more than 165 countries.

[See all the Bible translations available to be freely read on Bible Gateway]

As of Oc­to­ber 1, 2016, WGA’s new method of iden­ti­fy­ing trans­la­tion-need sug­gests more than 160 mil­lion peo­ple, speak­ing 1,700-1,800 lan­guages, may need some form of Bible trans­la­tion to begin.

[Browse the Bibles section in the Bible Gateway Store, where everything is always on sale]

Ap­prox­i­mately 100 or­gan­i­za­tions from more than 60 na­tions form the WGA. By pro­vid­ing staff, funds, train­ing, trans­la­tion, and sup­port ser­vices, WGA or­gan­i­za­tions are cur­rently in­volved in al­most 2,000 of the 2,422 lan­guages with ac­tive work.

WGA or­gan­i­za­tions and per­son­nel have been in­volved in the trans­la­tion of Bibles and New Tes­ta­ments in more than 900 lan­guages. At least one of the Bible’s 66 books has been pub­lished in an ad­di­tional 600 lan­guages. Many other lan­guages have other ini­tial por­tions published.

[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, The Bible Table of Contents]

Work­ing in com­mu­nity part­ner­ships, WGA per­son­nel not only as­sist in Scrip­ture-re­lated goals, but also help pro­duce thou­sands of re­sources for lit­er­acy, ed­u­ca­tion, health, and other com­mu­nity-based ob­jec­tives along­side Scripture.

An ever-in­creas­ing num­ber of Scrip­ture prod­ucts are now in dig­i­tal for­mats as text, au­dio, and video. These are of­ten avail­able on web­sites, so­cial me­dia, or through a va­ri­ety of phone apps, as well as in for­mats that can be eas­ily shared phone-to-phone in places with lim­ited Internet.

There are many ad­di­tional part­ner­ships and new ini­tia­tives con­tribut­ing to the growth of Bible trans­la­tion move­ments and the dis­tri­b­u­tion and use of God’s Word.

WGA re­ports pre­cise num­bers on what it knows but it fre­quently hears of new work and of trans­la­tions pre­vi­ously un­counted, mean­ing these num­bers con­tinue to fluc­tu­ate. Read the WGA FAQ sheet.

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