I was reading a Bible translation magazine this week and I thought I will concentrate my blog this week about the need for Bible translation in India. There are roughly around 6500 languages in the world. However around 2000 languages in the world have fewer than 1000 speakers. The most popular language in the world is not English and I am sure that will surprise some of my readers. It is Chinese language called 'Mandarin' spoken by 1,213, 000,000 native people. English is the most widely spoken language in the world, but not with the most native speakers, even though it has more than 2 billion speakers.

The vision of some of the Bible translation organization is to give the Word of God to every one in the world by 2025 in the language of their heart.  During 2005, New Testament translation in the language of the heart took  almost 15 long years to complete but now it will take only around 10 years because of the technological enhancement, cluster model approach and the involvement of the native speakers in the bible translation projects. According to the recent research we need the Bible for 1800 languages immediately which consist of around 1,30,000,000 people. To understand this population in the world, we only need to imagine the fact that it is more than the population of China or India or it is more than one out of every seven people in the world. 
 

In India we have more than 465 languages which are in use and immediately we need the Bibles to 100 more languages because there is not even a Bible Verse translated or available to these languages. When Isaiah see the vision of God and the call of God he hears: To whom shall I send and who will go for us. Isaiah says, Here I am ... send me lord....To some extend the missionaries in India are willing to go... but they lack resources.
William Carey who is considered as the father of modern missions wanted to translate the Bible into as many Indian languages as possible. History says he translated the Bible around 40 languages with the help of language scholars. Carey use to spent hours each day translating Scriptures, while he was also struggling to deal with his sick wife and financial crisis.

The Bible says in Rev. 5: 9 ....Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals; for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation...The question is how will they know and hear with out having the WORD OF GOD in their language of my heart.