Orlando-Based Ministry Translates Best-Selling Book of All Time into Last Languages

NOV. 22: Wycliffe - World’s Largest Bible Translation Organization - Launches Historic Effort to Reach World's Remaining Language Groups with Scripture by 2025

ORLANDO, Fla., Nov. 17, 2008—On the eve of National Bible Week, Orlando-based Wycliffe, the world's largest Bible translation organization, is launching the Last Languages Campaign, a historic, full-sprint effort to start a Bible translation program in the remaining one-third of the world's languages that need one by 2025.  The project strives to bring first-time access to Scripture for some 200 million people over the next 17 years.  

Some 300 staff and supporters will gather for the launch at Wycliffe's Orlando headquarters on Nov.  22 - the day before National Bible Week - a U.S. celebration of the value and importance of reading the Bible.  New strategies and high-tech translation techniques developed by Wycliffe personnel and their partners have accelerated the rate of Bible translation by three times over the last decade.  Wycliffe's goal is to reach the last languages with the life changing message of the Gospel in less than two decades rather than 125 years.

"The completion of Bible translation and the worldwide community development that accompanies it is now in sight," said Wycliffe USA President Bob Creson.

Wycliffe Bible Translators knows that, not only do people comprehend the Bible best when it is written in their mother-tongue language, but that critical community development - literacy, the establishment of water purification systems, AIDS education, human rights, and community empowerment - often starts in the strangest place: with Bible translation and the language development foundational to it. 

LAST LANGUAGES ORLANDO LAUNCH EVENT, NOV. 22: (Open to MEDIA and PUBLIC)

Location:  Wycliffe USA headquarters
                 11221 John Wycliffe Blvd.
                 Orlando, FL 32832

When:    10 a.m. - 2 p.m.

The Last Languages Campaign launch event will showcase how communities worldwide have been transformed through Bible translation and include access to Wycliffe's Wordspring Discovery Center - a 4,500 square foot interactive exhibit that explores the history of the Bible and Bible translation - called "an alternative to Disney" by USA Today (2006).

Interviews available with Wycliffe leaders and translators, contact (770) 813-0000.
On-site media contact: Scott Toncray (407) 375-2770.

Even before the official launch, this ambitious campaign has already received a $50 million donation toward its goal of complete Bible translation.  This gift, the largest in the ministry's 75-year history, will be used to bring Bible translation programs to the world's remaining Bible-less languages. 

Wycliffe USA moved its headquarters from Huntington Beach, Calif. to its 200-acre Orlando campus in 2002, bringing 250 new jobs to the area, thousands of long-term volunteers, and some 15,000 visitors each year to its interactive Discovery Center.  Founded in 1942, Wycliffe Bible Translators is the world’s largest Bible translation organization with more than 6,400 people working in 93 countries on six continents to make the Bible accessible to all people in the language most meaningful to them. 

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