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Since the arrival of Christianity in China, the Bible has been translated into many varieties of the Chinese language, both in fragments and in its totality. The first translations may have been undertaken as early as the 7th century AD, but the first printed translations appeared only in the nineteenth century. Progress on a modern translation was encumbered by denominational rivalries, theological clashes, linguistic disputes, and practical challenges at least until the publication of the Protestant Chinese Union Version in 1919, which became the basis of standard versions in use today.
Johannes Avetaranian, born Mehmet Şükri was originally a mullah in Turkey who converted from Islam to Christianity, and later became a missionary for the Swedish Mission Covenant Church in Southern Xinjiang (1892–1938). He translated the New Testament into the Uyghur language. He preached Christianity in Xinjiang and at a Swedish Protestant mission. He died in 1919, aged 58, in Wiesbaden.
Although Christianity became the state religion of Ethiopia in the 4th century, and the Bible was first translated into Ge'ez at about that time, only in the last two centuries have there appeared translations of the Bible into Amharic.
There are two main translations of the Bible into Japanese widely in use today—the Japanese New Interconfessional Translation Bible (新共同訳聖書) and the New Revised Bible (新改訳聖書). The New Japanese Bible, published by the Organization for the New Japanese Bible Translation (新日本聖書刊行会) and distributed by Inochinokotoba-sha, aims to be a literal translation using modern Japanese, while the New Interconfessional Version, published by the Japan Bible Society, aims to be ecumenically used by all Christian denominations and must therefore conform to various theologies. Protestant Evangelicals most often use the New Japanese Bible, but the New Interconfessional Version is the most widely distributed and the one used by the Catholic Church, the United Church of Christ, Lutheran Church factions and many Anglicans in Japan.
The royal Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander is an illuminated manuscript Gospel Book in middle Bulgarian, prepared and illustrated in 1355–1356 for Tsar Ivan Alexander of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The manuscript is regarded as one of the most important manuscripts of medieval Bulgarian culture. The manuscript, now in the British Library, contains the text of the Four Gospels illustrated with 366 miniatures and consists of 286 parchment folios, 33 by 24.3 cm in size.
Work on translation of the Bible into the Kazakh language began with the work of Charles Fraser of the Scottish Missionary Society. Fraser's translation of Matthew was published in 1818, and the New Testament in 1820 by the Russian Bible Society. J. M. E. Gottwald, a professor at Kazan University, revised it, and this was published in 1880 by the British and Foreign Bible Society in Kazan, and it was republished in 1887, and 1910. George W. Hunter, of the China Inland Mission in Ürümqi, considered this translation to be "a good translation, into Astrahan-Turki", he does not seem to have considered it to be Kazakh. Darlow and Moule say that it was intended for Kyrgyz in the neighbourhood of Orenburg, and the language was sometimes called "Orenburg Tatar". According to Rev. W. Nicholson of the Royal Asiatic Society in St Petersburg this translation was intended for "The Kirghese hordes—Great, Little, and Middle, as they are called—[who] occupy various regions in Southern Siberia, Central Asia, and west of the Caspian Sea." George A. King says Fraser's translation was into the language of the "Western Kirghiz or Kirghiz-Kazak, though they disown the name Kirghiz".
Bible translations into Persian have been made since the fourth or fifth century, although few early manuscripts survive. There are both Jewish and Christian translations from the Middle Ages. Complete translations of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament from original languages were first made in the 19th century by Protestant missionaries.
The first translations of the Bible into Turkish date back to the 17th century, yet the first printed edition did not appear until the early 19th century. In more recent history, there has been a significant increase in the quality and quantity of translations.
The modern Vietnamese alphabet chữ Quốc ngữ was created by Portuguese and Italian Jesuit missionaries and institutionalized by Alexandre de Rhodes with the first printing of Catholic texts in Vietnamese in 1651, but not the Bible. Some New Testament extracts were translated and printed in catechisms in Thailand in 1872.
Translation of the Bible into Malayalam began in 1806. Church historians say Kayamkulam Philipose Ramban, a scholar from Kayamkulam, translated the Bible from Syriac into Malayalam in 1811 to help the faithful get a better understanding of the scripture. The Manjummal translation is the first Catholic version of the Bible in Malayalam. This is the direct translation from Latin. The four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were translated by the inmates of the Manjummal Ashram, Fr. Aloysius, Fr. Michael and Fr. Polycarp. The Pancha Granthy came out from Mannanam under the leadership of Nidhirikkal Mani Kathanar in 1924. The Catholic New Testament was published in full in 1940, and has influenced development of the modern language.
Bible translations into Oceanic languages have a relatively closely related and recent history.
The modern Hindi and Urdu standards are highly mutually intelligible in colloquial form, but use different scripts when written, and have lesser mutually intelligibility in literary forms. The history of Bible translations into Hindi and Urdu is closely linked, with the early translators of the Hindustani language simply producing the same version with different scripts: Devanagari and Nastaliq, as well as Roman.
The history of Bible translations into the Tamil language commences with the arrival of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg at Tranquebar in 1706.Johann Philipp Fabricius, a German, revised Ziegenbalg's and others work to produce the standard Tamil version. Seventy years after Fabricius, at the invitation of Peter Percival a Saiva scholar, Arumuka Navalar, produced a "tentative" translation, which is known as the "Navalar version," and was largely rejected by Tamil Protestants.
Bible translations into the languages of Indonesia and Malaysia have a lot of common history up until the modern era. Apart from the shared Malay language which historically was the lingua franca of the Malay Archipelago and forms the basis for the national languages of Indonesia and Malaysia today, portions of the Bible have been translated into a variety of indigenous languages in the region.
The Bible, or portions of it, have been translated into over 1,000 languages of Africa.
The Bible has been translated into many of the languages of China besides Chinese. These include major minority languages with their own literary history, including Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian and Uyghur. The other languages of China are mainly tribal languages, mainly spoken in Yunnan in Southwest China.
The Hakka Bible: Today's Taiwan Hakka Version (TTHV), is the most recent revised Hakka language translation of the Bible used by Hakka Protestants in Taiwan and overseas Hakka communities. Work on the translation commenced in 1984 with the TTHV New Testament & Psalms completed in 1993, Proverbs was published separately in 1995. The entire Bible was made available on April 11, 2012 at the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan's annual General Assembly meeting. An ecumenical dedication and thanksgiving ceremony was held on April 22, 2012 at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu with over 1,200 Hakka Christians in attendance.
Christianity is a minority religion in Xinjiang, an autonomous region of China, formerly known as Chinese Turkestan. The dominant ethnic group, the Uyghur, are predominantly Muslim and very few are known to be Christian. Christianity in Xinjiang is the religion of 1% of the population according to the Chinese General Social Survey of 2009. According to Asia Harvest, estimates from 2020 suggest that of the entire population (24,992,119) about 3.77% is Christian (942,897).
Bible translations into Malay include translations of the whole or parts of the Bible into any of the levels and varieties of the Malay language. Publication of early or partial translations began as early as the seventeenth century although there is evidence that the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, translated religious texts that included Bible verses into Malay as early as the sixteenth century.
The Delegates' Version was a significant translation of the Bible into Chinese produced by a committee of Protestant missionaries in classical, literary Chinese. The New Testament was completed in 1850, and published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1852. Two separate Old Testament translations were produced, one published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1854 and in a single volume in 1858, whereas another was published by the American Bible Society in 1863.
References
- ↑ The American Asian Review -1987 Volume 5 p.17 "As an example of Nestorian Uyghur writing I will give a translation of a Uyghur fragment of the Bible. It consists of two pages in the Old Uyghur script, found in Bulayiq by the Second Prussian Turfan Expedition in 1905 and published by F.W. K. ..."
- ↑ Dickens, M., 2009, “Multilingual Christian manuscripts from Turfan”, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 9, 22-42.
- ↑ Witek, John. “Christianity in China: Universal Teaching from the West.” In China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future, ed. Stephen Uhalley, Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu, 2001, p. 16.
- ↑ Sutin, Lawrence. All is change: the two-thousand-year journey of buddhism to the west, 2006, pp. 56-7.
- ↑ Yu, Suee Yan (2021-03-10), Yeo, K. K (ed.), "Bible Translations for Ethnic Minority Groups in China", The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China, Oxford University Press, pp. 128–146, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190909796.013.32, ISBN 978-0-19-090979-6 , retrieved 2021-10-23
- ↑ Book of a Thousand Tongues