Originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek between 1000 B.C. and
100 A.D., the Bible is the world's most translated book. The first
complete translation, the Latin ``Vulgate,'' or common version, was
made in the 4th century by Jerome. By 1804 there were 67 languages
with at least one book translated; almost 200 years later that number
tops 2100, with more than 350 complete Bibles, and 880 New
Testaments.
Additional translations
are in process, including almost 500 new languages by United Bible
Society personnel
alone. Many versions
are now available electronically, either as text in the public domain,
or bundled with search software for a modest fee. See for example,
Bibleworks and Techflow biblical
software, as well
as Section 3.5.
The United Bible Society maintains a site that provides information on
whether and when translations were first made in a given
language. Sample
output is given below. Each response includes a link to the local
Bible Society, from which (certain) texts may be ordered (at least in
print).
You searched for Warlpiri This language is sometimes called Wailbri or Walpiri. Warlpiri is spoken in Australia (Northern Terr., Hooker Creek) First publication of: A single book of the Bible 1985 You searched for sorbish sorbish is referred to in this database as Sorbian: Upper. Sorbian: Upper is spoken in Germany (SE, Upper Saxony.) First publication of: A single book of the Bible 1670 The New Testament 1706 The Bible 1728 You searched for Kung That language name could not be found in the database. . . . Possible Matches: Languages in the database that closely match your query : kung: ekoka kung: tsumkwe Possible Matches: Variant language names that match your query : tsumkwe kung
The American Bible Society is experimenting with HTML markup and web
distribution of more comprehensive information on all translations.
The English sample below is from their Book of 2000 Tongues
project, an update of their Book of 1000 Tongues (Liana Lupas
and Erroll F. Rhodes, eds., 1939 and
1972).
ENGLISH Speakers: 450,000,000 first language speakers (1991 est.); 800,000,000 total including second language speakers (Ethn12). Location: United Kingdom, United States, international. Kinship: Indo-European / Germanic / West / North Sea / English. 1526 New Testament [Repr.+1836, +1837, +1989; Facs. 1862, +1976] Peter Schoeffer, Worms 1530 +Pentateuch [Repr. +1967, +1992] Hans Luft, Marburg (= J. Hoochstraten, Antwerp) 1531 Jonah [Facs. +1863] Martin de Kayser, Antwerp? Translated by William Tyndale (Hychyns). Only 10 sheets of Matthew were printed in 1525 by P. Quentell, Cologne, when work was interrupted to be resumed afresh at Worms. Revisions of the New Testament by Tyndale himself appeared in 1534 [Repr. +1938] and 1535 (often reprinted); the revised Pentateuch was published in 1534. ...
A number of versions the Bible are available in electronic media and
on the Web, including multiple language versions - for example, the
Bible Gateway web site makes available multiple English translations
(NIV, NASB, RSV, KJV, Darby, YLT) and versions in German, Swedish,
Latin, French, Spanish, and
Tagalog. However, our review
of versions of the Bible available on-line indicates that, while most
versions are in a format useful for browsing and searching, there is
no parallel corpus of the Bible, in the sense of a collection
of documents that is both marked up monolingually according to a
standard set of conventions and also explicitly aligned across
languages.
For example, the Bible Gateway site makes it possible for a user to
retrieve particular passages, and even entire chapters at once.
However, the markup in the retrieved text is presentational, and does
not make the document structure explicit enough for automatically
identifying the same verse in multiple languages. As a case in point,
Genesis 1:3-4 in an English (NIV) and French version are encoded as
follows:
<DT>3<DD>And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
<DT>4<DD>God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light
from the darkness.
<DT>3<DD>Dieu dit: Que la lumi\`{e}re soit! Et la lumi\`{e}re fut.
<DT>4<DD>Dieu vit que la lumi\`{e}re \'{e}tait bonne; et Dieu
s\'{e}para la lumi\`{e}re d'avec les t\'{e}n\`{e}bres.
In summary, the Bible is available in print form for a huge range of languages, and in on-line form for a respectable and growing subset of those languages. However, to our knowledge the project of creating a parallel corpus for the Bible has not been previously attempted.