Translation of Bible

The importance of Bible translation is of such great importance that at least one book of the scriptures has been translated and published in 2009 languages and dialects.

Professional translation of the Bible is the greatest undertaking of inter-lingual communication in the history of the world. Bible, the holy book of Christianity consists of the following:

1. The Old Testament: a collection of 39 books constituting the sacred scriptures of Judaism and written primarily in Hebrew, with a few portions in Aramaic.
2. The New Testament: 27 books originally written in Greek between AD 50 and 100.
3. The Apocrypha: 12 books taken over by the early Christian Church from the Greek version of the Old Testament but not forming part of the Hebrew Bible and also not accepted as canonical by the orthodox Jews. The apocryphal books, are accepted by Roman Catholics but rejected by Protestants as a basis of doctrines.

The history of Bible translation is divided into three main periods:

1. The Greco Roman period which extended from 200 BC to 700 AD.
2. The Reformation period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
3. The modern period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Greco Roman period

The first translation of the Hebrew Bible was The Septuagint. The term Septuagint literally means “translation of the seventy interpreters” in Latin and “translation of the seventy” in Greek. The Septuagint was the translation of the Hebrew Bible and some of its related texts into Koine Greek. This first professional translation of the Bible is also called the Greek Old Testament, is also quoted a number of times in the New Testament. The Septuagint dates back to the second and third centuries BC, but the Latin name Septuagint was given to these translations by Augustine of Hippo, in between the years 354 to 430 BC.

To translate the Bible and be included in the Library of Alexandria, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Greek King of Egypt required translation services of seventy two of his Jewish scholars. A story in the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud explains this “King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one’s room and said: “Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher”. God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.”

During this period the New Testament was also translated into Latin. Subsequent translations of both the New as well as the Old Testament into many Middle East languages also took place. Some of these languages were the Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Persian and Gothic.

The Reformation and the Modern period

In the Reformation period the Bible was translated into many European languages. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German language. A notable Bible translation of the time was that of William Tyndale, whose translated version later formed the basis of King James Bible. It was the translated version of King James Bible which became the Authorized Version of the Bible and had great impact in Modern period translations of the Bible. Notable professional translation of the modern times were the English Revised Version of 1885, American Standard Version of 1901, Revised Standard Bible of 1952, the New Revised Standard Bible of 1989, the New American Bible of 1970 and the New English Bible of 1970. Subsequently various translations for languages of the missionary world were undertaken by eminent translators of the time.

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