The most translated website in the world: more than 1,000 languages!

20 November, 2019

We might think that it is Wikipedia, Google, or the website of a language academy, but no. The most translated website in the world is JW.org, the official website of the Jehovah’s Christian Witnesses. The most translated website in the world is JW.org, the official website of the Jehovah’s Christian Witnesses.

This week they have achieved this fascinating record with natural translation, that is, with human translators, not with an automatic translation system.

The next website, but far behind, is Wikipedia with 306 languages as of the date of writing this article.

Is it profitable to translate into so many languages?

his is one of the most fascinating facts about this titanic task. Far from being profitable, translating such a large website into more than 1000 languages is an extremely arduous and expensive task. But JW.org is not a commercial website, but a website that aims to inform about the Bible to anyone who has the desire to know it better. At the same time, this website is the official communication channel of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with official information on many topics, not only doctrinal. They offer a lot of multimedia material, videos, music, medical information, news, etc.

But who is behind all this work? They explain it themselves on their website:

Much of the translation is done by well-trained volunteers working from the approximately 350 remote translation offices around the world.

Reference from JW.org

All these volunteer translators around the world use software called MEPS to coordinate all their work. They even create the characters and fonts that are not available because no one has found it profitable to create them due to the few people who speak some languages and dialects. It is curious that even in some of those languages, JW.org is the only website that exists on the Internet.

Why so much effort?

If the goal is not to make money, why do hundreds of volunteers work so hard to achieve this educational feat? According to them, they make the effort following their desire to obey this biblical prophecy:

 Go, therefore, and make disciples of people of all the nations.

Matthew 28:19

In this day and age, what the authors of this website have achieved is undoubtedly quite a feat. This website, along with the thousands of tools and databases that offer their contents in an open and free way, make up the friendly face of the Internet. We applaud initiatives like this from CurioFeed.

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