The New Year is a great time to think about your hopes, dreams, aims and plans for the year to come. At Biblica, we’ve been making plans for the next three years – to help us reach the goal of everyone, everywhere having access to God’s Word in a way they can understand.
More translation projects
For the last few decades, Biblica has been working with an alliance of other Bible translators to produce high-quality Bible translations for the top 100 majority languages around the world. Achieving this will allow an enormous number of people to access the Bible.
Amazingly, this task is now almost complete! So we’re looking at the next important goal.
There are still an estimated 1,900 minority languages without an accurate, contemporary Bible. That’s hundreds of millions of people around the world who have no meaningful access to a relevant and reliable Bible in their own language.
We’re going to use our resources to tackle this challenge. Over the next three years, we plan to grow our active translation projects from 62 to 140.
Using technology to get there…
But how can we double our translation speed? Technological advances are really helping here. One innovation we plan to make much more use of is AI-assisted translation, which has performed well in pilot projects. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) we’ve been testing can produce a rough first draft of a translation into a new language very quickly, ready for expert human translators to work on and fine-tune. This will radically reduce the time needed to make a new translation, so that we can reach more people with the Gospel sooner.
Investing in digital versions
It’s not just fashionable to do things digitally – it’s strategic. In many places around the world where Bible access is the most difficult, people could actually download and read the Bible on their phone, if there were a digital translation available in their language. This would be a much easier way to get God’s Word to a huge number of people who have been very hard to reach until now. We’ve already made progress in this area, and we’re committing to making more digital versions of the scriptures available in more languages and more accessible formats as a priority over the next few years.
Working strategically with others
One other aim for 2023 and beyond is to partner more strategically with the organisations around the world who have the best infrastructure and contacts – those who can distribute Bible resources effectively to the most people in need.
When we put this all together, the number of people worldwide who can open a Bible for the first time will grow hugely by 2025. We’re excited – thanks for being part of it!
