Christians in Zambia are ecstatic because the Bible has finally been translated into their language.
Christians in the African nation of Zambia are rejoicing over the recent completion of Bibles translated into their own languages.
CBN News reports that Wycliffe Associates, which provides Bible translations in several languages, is at the helm of this initiative. More than five thousand people are currently engaged in translating the Bible into twenty different indigenous languages in Zambia.
Church planter and pastor Bishop Henry Mumba is working with translation efforts in Munsa. John 3:16 was the first Bible verse he had heard when he was 19 years old, he said.
Mumba said in an interview for CBN News, “My pastor was a missionary from another nation.” “And Jesus arrived into this town and when they proclaimed the Gospel to me, the first scripture that I remembered was John 3:16, ‘For God so love the world, that He gave His only son that whomever believes in Him may not perish, but have everlasting life.'”
Some reports indicate that after hearing the New Testament read aloud in Aushi, the language of the believers in Mansa, Zambia, they broke out into joyful dance.
‘It’s like God is speaking our language,’ Mumba remarked.
As the bishop also mentioned, the Bible is the first piece of literature to be written in the Aushi language.
“We’ve never had anything before,” he remarked.
The New Testament was also translated into Nynja and Laya, in addition to the Aushi version.
“We have 73 languages in this country. Even fewer were recognized as “official” than that, though: just seven. Only those people had Bibles with translated text “Livingston’s Pastor Buster Paul Tembo Tembo elaborated.
Tembo, who oversees the translation efforts of the Livingston church, argued that having the Bible available to Christians in their own tongue had a “huge spiritual impact in their lives.”
He said that “the knowledge you have or bring to the audience is so clear” when the text was “brought out” in the native tongue and “read out” by native speakers.
Church-owned Bible translation, as defined by Wycliffe Associates President and CEO Simoun Ung, means that the local church is responsible for the translation and publication of the Scriptures.
One of the difficulties, in Ung’s view, is figuring out how to speed up the translation process without sacrificing accuracy.
“Seeing the land makes the Bible’s relevance obvious. Daily, people lose their lives without ever hearing about Jesus Christ. We need to move quickly if we want to do anything, “”, she remarked.
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