Wycliffe UK is a Christian charity committed to the goal of providing God’s Word, the Bible, to every man, woman and child in the world in their own language. Wycliffe is named after John Wycliffe who first translated the Bible from the language of the highly educated, Latin, to English, making it available to the common people.
Wycliffe was formed in 1942 by William Cameron Townsend. He was a missionary to the Cakchiquel Indians of Guatemala and started his work by unsuccessfully trying to sell Spanish Bibles to the local people. He was challenged by the need for translation when a Cakchiquel man asked him, “If your God is so great, why doesn’t he speak in my language?” This prompted Townsend to learn the Cakchiquel language, create an alphabet for it, analyse the grammar and translate the New Testament-all in 10 years! Townsend later founded a linguistics training school to equip young translators and this grew into Wycliffe. In 2000 Wycliffe celebrated the completion of the 500th New Testament translation.
Wycliffe has stated a challenging vision-to see a translation project begun in all the remaining languages of the world by 2025. Today, 2,403 languages have some scriptures or the whole Bible. Around 2,000 projects are in progress but around 2,286 language groups do not have a single verse of God’s Word in their language. This is nearly half of the world’s 6,900 languages!
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