New World Translation REVISED Editions (page 4)

OrphanCrow

Slim: Languages with more than 100,000 JWs that have no new Bible include: Spanish, French, German, Polish, ~~Russian~~, Japanese, Tagalog.

Several copies of the Russian translation of the JW Bible can likely be found is a warehouse someplace near the Finnish-Russian border.

We know the org did a Russian translation of their Bible because 2,016 copies were seized back in 2015 when the org shipped them to Russia and last year, the JW bible was banned in Russia. It was the new translation because one of the contentions was the insertion of "Jehovah" in the NT.

Drearyweather

was looking at the 2015 Service Report which had one publisher in Bangladesh for 631,355. I rounded it off to 7,000. Is your number based on a newer report?

I based it on 2017 report. But how are you calculating the numbers? Even for 2015, it shouldnt be 1 in 7000

btlc

Anyone knows whats the difference between Revised NWT and 1984 Edition? Beside inserted pamphlets and colored Appendix? There is some textual changes, but it is english specific, i don't know how much these changes affects to existing translations.

Btw, the most of the "obscure" languages on that list:

https://www.jw.org/download/?fileformat=PDF&output=html&pub=nwt&option=TRGCHlZRQVNYVrXF

didn't have complete NWT prior 2013, just a "part" (the new testament), so that is the very first complete NWT to them.

fastJehu

btlc
Anyone knows whats the difference between Revised NWT and 1984 Edition?

Yes. The user "MeanMrMustard" had done this job perfekt. He read both bibles into an SQL database and compared them. Then he highlighted the differences in a PDF document in color.

Here a snippet:

(The baseline is the 1984 version. The text that has been removed from the 1984 version is marked with strikethrough. The added text is colored green. Text that the 1984 and 2013 versions share is left black with no markup.)

btlc

@fastJehu - thank you very much! and thanks to @MeanMrMustard for a great work!

I compared that sample to my (small) language (2006 the first complete edition, translated from the 1984 NWT) and it seems to me pretty much closer to 2013 Edition english vocabular, there is simply no room for any improvement worth a new edition, since it include the most of the appendixs and references from the 1984 "reference edition". And we got the same edition, "gray leather" reprint 2011, so my ETA for 2013 edition on my language is like never.

About other "big" languages (beside english), they already have a dozens of translations of very good quality and people are familiar with them, issuing a "new" edition with inserted pamphlets could be considered as a retrograde move. I can understand if someone at the branches hesitates to give a final aproving.

Native african and asian small languages, on the other hand, usualy have poor or incomplete translations, so Watchtower targeted them to make NWT as a their standard luxury leather Bible, soaked with JW interpretation and propaganda. Dishonest and good for bussiness move, I would say.

Drearyweather

Yes, Its 2017 report.

https://www.jw.org/en/publications/books/2017-service-year-report/2017-country-territory/

slimboyfat

It was the new translation because one of the contentions was the insertion of "Jehovah" in the NT.

The old version would have had Jehovah in the NT as well, no?

fastJehu

slimboyfat
The old version would have had Jehovah in the NT as well, no?

Yes. Beside that, in the revised 2013 version the word Jehovah was inserted in 4 or 5 more places of the Old Testament.

slimboyfat

The reason the NWT was released in English (and Korean and Portuguese) was apparently timing. These versions were printed and ready to go before the financial crisis hit Watchtower in 2015.

The question you’ve got to ask is, how bad must the financial position be that they need to sudden sell off branches, send bethelites home, cancel the yearbook, and even cancel Bibles in languages that are apparently already completed.

If Watchtlwer can’t afford to print Bibles now, will they ever be able to print them? Lawsuits are mounting, members are decreasing in rich countries and increasing poor countries. If they are already in trouble now, what is it going to be like next year, and the year after that? How can they turn it around?

slimboyfat

I have been told that in Germany the new literature contains the new wording of a the revised version that hasn’t been released yet. So the scriptures quoted in the literature doesn’t match the wording of the NWT version they use either in print or online. Can anyone in Germany confirm that?

If so it seems the new German version is complete but hasn’t been printed and distributed, similar to rumours about the Spanish version having been completed years ago.

Sir82 the fact is there were around 200 million copies of the old NWT printed between 1950 and 2013 when the number of JWs averaged around 3 million over the whole period. So how many copies would be needed between 2013 and 2018 when there are over 8 million JWs? I think 50 million is a reasonable estimate. I personally have three copies of the 2013 NWT in English and two foreign language versions. I think it’s very common for JWs to have a few copies of the Bible each, and to replace them periodically as well.

New World Translation REVISED Editions

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