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55 years to translate the Bible into Japanese

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55 years was shat it too in order to translate the entire Bible into Japanese. A long-winded job which was finally completed at the end of August.

It was the Franciscan Biblical School, founded in Tokyo in 1956, which was responsible for translating the various volumes of the Bible. After more than a half century of work, interspersed with publications (the translation of Genesis in 1958, the New Testament in 1979 and the book of Jeremiah in 2002), a full version of the Bible is now available in one volume.

Note: Japan has 537,000 baptised Catholics, less than 0.5% of the population.

Source languages

The translation was carried out from Hebrew and Greek, the original languages and not from the Latin, the Vulgate, used previously to translate excerpts from the Bible.

The book was presented to Cardinal Raffaele Farina, director of the Vatican Library, at Mass in late August in Tokyo Cathedral.

More than 2,500 versions

The Bible is currently available in 2,508 languages and dialects: 731 in Africa, 1052 in Asia-Pacific, 210 in Europe, Middle East, 512 in America (North and South) and 3 constructed languages. According to the 2009 report, "more than 4,000 languages still don’t even have one book of the bible”.

When you realise it takes on average 12 years to implement a full version, the amount of work seems immeasurable!

Understanding and interpreting

Religious translation requires involves not only having impeccable linguistic skills, but also specialised translations who have a deep understanding of the text and can adapt it for each culture and country.