American Bible Society Touts New Chinese Translation

By By Joshua A. Goldberg

The American Bible Society and a team of scholars are visiting churches and congregations in some of the United States' largest Chinese communities to introduce the Revised Chinese Union Version (RCUV) of the Bible – the first Chinese language update to the Bible since 1919.

"This new Bible translation honors the many Chinese who have paid a high price and waited so long to experience the Bible," says ABS President R. Lamar Vest.

"We hope this new translation will allow the nation of China and Chinese readers throughout the world to read, with familiarity and ease, the Bible's life-changing message," adds Marco Herrera, director of international ministries at New York-based ABS.

Last week, scholars managing the creation of the RCUV Bible visited churches and congregations in New York to introduce the newly updated Bible translation. ABS announced this past Tuesday the scholars' intention to also visit San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston - home to over 152 thousand, 63 thousand, and 24 thousand Chinese Americans, respectively.

While versions of the English Bible undergo revision every 20 or 30 years to keep up with sizable changes within the modern language, Chinese have not had an updated and widely accepted Bible translation in their own language for more than 90 years.

Furthermore, the Chinese Union Version that is presently available to the 70 million Chinese Christians worldwide is filled with characters that are no longer commonly used. The translation can be confusing to modern Chinese readers in more than 300,000 Chinese churches across the globe, reports ABS .

To remedy this, scholars from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and America got together to create the RCUV Bible, which has been carefully designed to be free from biases in language usage based on regionalism or dialects.

Twenty-seven years in the making, the RCUV Bible was produced by ABS in collaboration with the United Bible Society and the Hong Kong Bible Society.

The new translation will be available fall 2010 at Bibles.com.

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