The
World English Bible (also known as WEB) is a
public domainWorks are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
translation of the
BibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
that is currently in draft form. Work on the World
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
Bible began in 1997 and was known as the
American Standard Version 1997. The New Testament is considered complete and is available in print.
Features
The World English Bible project was started to produce a modern English Bible version that is not copyrighted, does not use archaic English (such as the KJV), or is not translated in
Basic EnglishBasic English, also known as Simple English, is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a Second Language...
(such as the
Bible In Basic EnglishThe Bible In Basic English is a translation of the Bible into Basic English. The BBE was translated by Professor S. H. Hooke using the standard 850 Basic English words. 100 words that were helpful to understand poetry were added along with 50 "Bible" words for a total of 1,000 words total...
). The World English Bible follows the American Standard Version's decision to
transliterateTransliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
the
TetragrammatonThe term Tetragrammaton refers to the name of the God of Israel YHWH used in the Hebrew Bible.-Hebrew Bible:...
, but updates "
JehovahJehovah is an anglicized representation of Hebrew , a vocalization of the Tetragrammaton , the proper name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible....
" to be "
YahwehYahweh is the name of God in the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jews and Christians.The word Yahweh is a modern scholarly convention for the Hebrew , transcribed into Roman letters as YHWH and known as the Tetragrammaton, for which the original pronunciation is unknown...
".
Translation philosophy
It is based on the 1901
American Standard VersionThe Revised Version, Standard American Edition of the Bible, more commonly known as the American Standard Version , is a version of the Bible that was released in 1901...
, the Greek
Majority Text, and the Hebrew
Biblia Hebraica StuttgartensiaThe Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, or ', is an edition of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as preserved in the Leningrad Codex, and supplemented by masoretic and text-critical notes...
. There are seven passes of editing and proofreading for each book. An initial automated pass updated approximately 1,000 archaic words, phrases and grammatical constructs. The first manual pass was to add quotation marks (the ASV had none) and other punctuation, and to check the translation against the Greek and Hebrew texts where there are significant textual variants or the meaning is unclear.
External links