While the world loses a language every 40 days, translation efforts bring new life to threatened tongues.
Bible translators have made it a priority to give people around the world the chance to study Scripture in their “heart language.”
Even if Christians are able to understand another language, there are significant benefits to hearing the gospel in one’s mother tongue. It makes it easier to grasp theological concepts and builds a deeper emotional connection to the message.
But over the past several decades, these heart language translations haven’t only changed how Christians from various cultural backgrounds approach their faith; they have also affected how believers view their familial language.
“As they begin to read the Bible in their own language, pray in their own language, and worship in their own language, they realize, ‘Wait, if I can do these things, maybe I could do even more,’” said Andy Keener, executive vice president for global partnerships at Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Across continents, Bible translation teams have watched how their work—sometimes creating an alphabet for the language or documenting its written form for the first time—can change the trajectory of the tongue itself.
“Bible translation is transformative for a language, especially during the life of the project itself, when it engages some of the best minds of the community in solving formidably difficult problems in semantic mapping, orthography, metaphor, and language standardization,” linguist K. David Harrison wrote in a foreword to a recent academic volume on the effects of Bible translation on language. “But it also extends in influence far beyond the original project, and shines as an example of best practice in ensuring language survival.”
Around a third of …
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