Asia  

Many people don’t know it, but the continent of Asia includes the holy lands and east to China, Indonesia and Japan. Asia is the birthplace of today’s five major religions— Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism. 

Cultural Understanding

The Bible itself and much of its content had its origins in Asia. An understanding of Asian (sometimes called Eastern) cultures, particularly the culture of the Jewish people, often aids in greater understanding of Scripture. In areas where people may not have familiarity with Jewish customs, Wycliffe translation teams often translate a book called How the Jews Lived with Scriptures.   

Complex Writing Systems  

Asia contains 31 percent of the world’s languages and has the greatest number of languages without accessible Scripture. One of the challenges of translating Scripture in Asia is the great number of complex writing systems. While many languages in the world, like English, have over time adopted a Roman script, more than 3 billion people use non-Roman scripts. Most of these people live in Asia. Some of these scripts include Burmese, Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, Thai, Mongolian and Bengali. The Non-Roman Script Initiative, a department of SIL International, was formed with the goal of creating software that simplifies translation into these scripts. One program, Worldpad, is already in use in some translations. It is also being used by other international organizations.  

Some History 

Cuneiform, believed to have been the first writing system, was invented by the Sumerians in the area of modern Iraq. Thought to have been originally used around the 34th century B.C., this writing system later became the foundation of writing systems for several ancient languages.

Scripture translations in Asia began in the second century A.D., with a translation into Syriac, a language of Turkey. In the seventh century A.D., a translation was completed into Arabic, a language of the Arabian Peninsula. By 1629 the gospel had reached farther east with a Malay translation of the book of Matthew. William Carey and his colleagues translated Scripture into more than 20 of the languages of India in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Two Chinese translations of the Bible were completed in the 1820s.