Wycliffe celebrates translating Bible into 800th language.
Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) have celebrated the translation of the Bible into an 800th language and have said that Bible translation is proceeding at an exponential rate.
Named after the 14th century priest John Wycliffe, one of the first people to translate the Bible into English, the WBT said it was not until the early 1800s that the Bible was translated into just 50 languages.
By the final quarter of the 19th century this had doubled to 100 languages and by 1950 the Bible was available in 200 languages.
Since then, the rate has accelerated even faster. By 1998 the Bible had been translated into 400 languages. WBT noted that in celebrating the 800th language, they were also witnessing exponential growth in the rate of translation. What previously took nearly two millennia, is now being accomplished in just over two decades.
In the last five years, 500 million more people have access to a Bible in their mother tongue. CT.
