The electronic texts of the Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish triple combinations of the scriptures are now available online on the Church’s scriptures Web site at the following addresses:
- Finnish: scriptures.lds.org/fi
- Norwegian: scriptures.lds.org/no
- Swedish: scriptures.lds.org/sv
You can also find a link to these online scriptures on the individual LDS.org language materials pages. The online triple combination provides footnotes, study helps, maps, photographs, and the ability to mark scriptures. More information about this effort will be printed in the “News of the Church” section of the June 2009 Liahona magazines.
This brings the total number of languages on the Church’s scriptures Web site to 12: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Additional scripture translations will continue to be converted over the next several years.
I’ve been curious about this process along with the other materials that the Church puts up. Is there a list that ranks the languages by priority? Is this done by the number of members who speak that language, the potential for growth of members in that language, etc?
The next languages are planned to be Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. There are a number of factors that go into order of conversion (# members, status of database, regional Internet usage, etc.)
Some people have been using Google to find my blog, apparently after reading this article. To save more people some time, and get you right to the sources others are looking for:
If you’re looking for the church’s online language resources, check here.
If you’re looking for the 106 printed (hard copy) languages (plus English and Spanish Braille) that the Book of Mormon has been translated into, check here, at http://www.ldscatalog.com, under Missionary Work -> Book of Mormon.
If you’re looking for the approximately 159 languages in which the church has any material (such as the Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith, or “Gospel Fundamentals,” check here, at http://www.ldscatalog.com, under Other Language Materials -> List of Available Items by Language. There you will see a list of PDF files which list the materials you can order from the Distribution Center.
To get a feel for how many of those languages are spoken in the US, and see which 57 Book of Mormon translations are spoken in Indianapolis alone check here.
This is fantastic! Thank you so much. Now we who read finnish dont need to go on an anti site any more to read scriptures on line! Norwegean too!
Larry:
Over on languages.lds.org, if English-only speaking members are looking for material, for say, their Cambodian-speaking non-member friends, they can’t tell which language is Cambodian/Laotian, because it’s written in Cambodian/Laotian.
And, for instance, not many English-only speaking people know that “Hmoob” means “Hmong”.
Therefore, for the languages which aren’t obvious in English, here’s a suggestion:
Could you put a pop-up tag (I think it’s the “alt” tag in the “a href” HTML link) giving the name of the language in English ?
The languages section of LDS.org seems to cater only to members who speak those languages.
Why not cater also to English-only-speaking members who want to do a little outreach to their foreign-language-speaking non-member friends?
Another way to cater to English-only-speaking members who want to do outreach to their foreign-born friends, is to make an association between the languages and the countries where they are spoken.
Most people know where their immigrant friends and associates are from, but not what their native languages are. For instance, you’ll know that your friend is from Nigeria before you’ll know that he/she speaks Igbo or Yoruba.
Therefore, if you can somehow put country names in parenthesis after the language, like:
Igbo (Nigeria)
Yoruba (Nigeria)
Tagalog (Philippines)
Cebuano (Philippines)
Bikolano (Philippines)
Hiligaynon (Philippines)
Urdu (Pakistan, Afghanistan)
Sinhala (India)
Lingala (DR Congo)
etc.
The list of foreign-language editions of the Book of Mormon at http://www.ldsCatalog.com also could use something like this.
It’s really amazing how many immigrants we are surrounded by in our every-day lives.
One Saturday when I ate out twice, and did some shopping, and did laundry at a laundromat, I asked everyone I met who seemed foreign-born where they were from and what languages they spoke.
That day I met 17 people who spoke 14 languages.
Have been vainly searching for the best way to read my scriptures on my Treo 700wx. The section on LDS.org about PDAs doesn’t seem comprehensive. The only ‘official’ version is through EZReader, which doesn’t work on new handheld devices and does not have new content. The other readers have access to misc content, but no scriptures. Am I missing something?
A post on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Also, any info about LDS scriptures for handhelds in other languages would be great.
Scott,
We provide content for Palm operating systems in 5 reader formats: MarkMyScriptures, Mobipocket, iSilo, eReader, and Plucker. Choose one at http://www.lds.org/handheld/0,18493,5299-1,00.html and you’ll see information on downloading the reader, as well as links to the content to download.
We are currently working on a strategy for providing more content (scriptures, manuals, magazines, etc.) on handheld devices, but have nothing decided to announce at this point. We’re working on plans for other platforms (like Windows Mobile and iPhone) and plans for languages, but we don’t have any details yet. We may decide to provide an XML service that will provide the raw XML and allow users to format it themselves for various platforms and readers. None of it is decided yet, but we’ll post here when decisions are made.
Thanks for your interest.