The British Bible Society

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 22, 1910

The British Bible Society

WE may have mentioned before that the report of the British Bible Society shows that during 1909 they sold 6,620,000 copies or portions of the Scriptures. The following facts, culled from the report, are told by the Christian Work:—

The report has an interesting historical resumé of the 106 years of its existence. It calls attention to the fact that it has issued during this time 222,000,000 copies of the Scriptures. These have been printed in 424 different languages, divided somewhat as follows: 75 from Europe, 152 from Asia, 103 from Africa, 32 from the Americas, and 62 from the Pacific islands — Oceanica. These many translations represent the sacrificial labor of hundreds of devoted missionaries; for the translations into the vernacular are almost always done by a missionary. He studies the native language carefully for many years, then he puts several more years of labor on its translation. Our readers can not realize the difficulty and embarrassment of doing this until they remember that half these languages have no literature, no books, of course no dictionary, and also that many languages have no words for Biblical ideas and truths. For instance, to take just one case, when the attempt was made to translate the Bible into the language of the Tierra del Fuegian Indians, there were no words in the language for love, faith, hope, mercy, pity, forgiveness, purity, brotherhood, salvation, redemption, immortality, heaven, and a hundred other such terms. These things were unknown to them; consequently there were no words—neither images nor illustrations—that could be used. What could the translator do?—Often he had to wait until he had awakened some faint foreshadowing of these qualities in the native mind before he could make his translation.