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Your Bible​—How It Was Produced

IN OUR violent, hungry and polluted world there is no shortage of bad news. But here is some good news: In these wicked “last days” of Satan’s system of things millions of copies of God’s Word, the Bible, are being printed in hundreds of languages and are being distributed over all the earth.​—2 Tim. 3:1.

How much Satan and his demons would like to stop this worldwide distribution of God’s Word! Yet the complete Bible is available in 275 languages today, and at least one or more of the Bible books can be found in 1,710 tongues, making God’s Word available in the language of virtually everyone on earth. Even in this dark epoch of human history, ‘Jehovah’s hand is not too short’ to get his life-giving Word to those needing it.​—Isa. 50:2.

True, some are distributing Bibles with an eye on the cash register. An estimated 20 million copies are sold in the United States yearly, many for profit. But other persons are translating, printing and distributing God’s Word out of love for God and neighbor. Jehovah’s Witnesses are especially active in such work.

Early Christians pioneered the development of the codex (an early form of looseleaf book that replaced the cumbersome scrolls then in use). In a similar way, modern-day Christian witnesses of Jehovah are making good use of up-to-date computerized typesetting and composition methods, coupled with advanced offset printing equipment. Their goal? To make Bibles available to everyone at nominal cost. Perhaps you have a copy of the new, 1981 edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Would you like to know how this Bible was produced?

FROM QUILLS TO COMPUTERS

You would not have a Bible to read if careful scribes in the past had not painstakingly copied the Scriptures by hand. In fact, the Hebrew word for “scribe” comes from a root meaning “to count,” because, according to the Talmud, the scribes would count the letters and words in each section of Scripture to be sure that they made no mistakes! The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls proved that those scribes did good work, since those ancient manuscripts agreed closely with the later Masoretic text despite nearly one thousand years of copying that separated them.

The Christian Greek Scriptures likewise were copied with utmost care, at first onto papyrus, and later onto more durable parchment. Rather than using the cumbersome scrolls of the day, the early Christians preferred to write the Scriptures on separate sheets, which could be fastened together or kept in a box. This made it much easier for zealous first-century preachers to compare various Scriptural passages, thus “proving by references” that Jesus was the promised Messiah.​—Acts 17:3.

Of course, Bibles are no longer copied by hand. The very first book printed on Johann Gutenberg’s newly invented printing press about 1450 C.E. was the Latin Vulgate Bible, and 47 copies of that edition still exist. With the invention of modern printing, the Bible could be made available to the common man, and Bible translations in vernacular languages soon appeared, despite Church opposition. Whereas a scribe could copy only a few pages a day, the modern web offset press that printed the 1981 edition of the New World Translation can produce over 20,000,000 Bible pages daily! While a scribe ran the risk of making mistakes on every page, the modern press precisely duplicates the text, copy after copy. The Bible text reproduced by the press has been stored in a computer and transferred to film for making plates. Thus, new plates for the press can be made without the risk of human transcription error. Bible production has come a long way!

EXAMINING THE 1981 “NEW WORLD TRANSLATION”

The 1981 edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures is the culmination of 35 years of studious translation and careful revision. The translating project was initiated back in 1946, and by 1960 both the Hebrew and the Greek portions of God’s Word had been rendered into English directly from the original languages. During those years of translation a great deal of careful research was done by the New World Bible Translation Committee to assure that the translation was internally consistent in word choice and that the best possible readings of various manuscripts were used in the text. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who use the New World Translation as their primary Scriptural reference, have greatly appreciated and benefited from this scholarly work.

However, the work of the translation committee (whose members remain anonymous at their request) was not finished in 1960. The New World Translation was first issued as a single volume in 1961, and this edition incorporated a careful revision of all the previous work. Since the 1961 edition contained no footnotes, a number of footnote readings from the earlier editions were put in the main text to conform more closely to the literal meaning of the original languages. A second revision, in 1970, took note of changes both in English usage and in the understanding of the ancient languages being translated. Over 100 words or expressions used in the 1961 edition were therefore altered. In 1971, the New World Translation was issued in a larger-print format with footnotes, and another revision of the text was made.

It is the desire of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, which holds the copyright to the New World Translation, that this excellent translation be kept up to date. The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures aims to render God’s Word accurately and literally in harmony with the living, changing languages currently understood by its readers. This translation values reliable transmission of God’s Word above stylistic or literary considerations that mark many modern idiomatic or paraphrased Bible versions.

The 1981 edition of the New World Translation is the result of a further careful review of the preceding editions, made with the above guiding principles in mind. This review was greatly facilitated by the recent installation of advanced computerized typesetting and composition equipment at the Watchtower Society’s main printing plant in Brooklyn, New York.

In December 1979 operators sitting at computer terminals began entering the Bible into the Society’s computer. In a little over five months, the typing of two different editions of the New World Translation into the computer had been completed. One was the 1970 revision and the other was the larger-print 1971 edition.

This dual entry method served two purposes. First, it helped to reduce the amount of time spent proofreading the Bible. To this end, the Society’s data processing department designed a computer program to compare these two editions letter by letter. What would happen when the slightest difference was detected? The computer was instructed to print out the entire verse containing the discrepancy, indicating precisely where it occurred in the verse.

So this minimized the proofreaders’ work in searching for text entry errors. The computer found most of them! True, once in a very great while the two typists made the very same mistake on the very same word. But that occurred only once in every 500,000 keystrokes, and these errors were located by the proofreaders and corrected.

Additionally, the entry of two different editions of the New World Translation allowed the computer to locate every verse in which the two versions differed, no matter how slight the variation. The New World Bible Translation Committee then reviewed each of these differences and decided which rendering to use in the 1981 edition. With the help of the computer, proofreaders were able to find very slight variations in the text of the New World Translation. For example, some proper names were divided into two syllables in one part of the Bible (Aʹdam, Eʹsau), and in another part appeared as one word without the syllables indicated. Minor differences involving quotation marks, parentheses and brackets also were located and cleared up. The final result is that the 1981 edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures is the most accurate and consistent edition the Society has ever published.

COMPUTERIZED COMPOSITION

The computer does far more than assist proofreaders. It is a marvelous tool for page composition as well. How so?

Previous editions of the New World Translation were set on Linotype machines, requiring upward of a thousand man-hours of work. The operators of these machines typed the Bible text one line at a time, deciding at the end of each line if the last word in the line needed to be hyphenated and, if so, how the word should be divided. In the course of setting type for the entire Bible, Linotype operators had to make thousands of such decisions. Inevitably, some hyphenation errors resulted.

Moreover, “Linotype operators are only human,” pointed out one experienced factory worker, “and they don’t all set type exactly the same way. Some of them tend to set type a little ‘tight,’ which means they will try to squeeze a little more on every line than other operators, who set ‘loose.’ Or the same operator might set type somewhat differently on different days.”

The Society’s computer eliminated the need for Linotypes in Bible production. Once it contained the text of the New World Translation the computer program decided how that text should be composed into lines of type, and how the lines should be arranged on pages. The computer was programmed to hyphenate words with a high degree of accuracy, and it set type with the same degree of “tightness” throughout the entire Bible, improving the appearance of the printed page.

Actually, the computer cannot set type by itself. All it can do is decide how the type should be set. The type is really set by an electronic phototypesetter, which is controlled by the main computer. This machine uses an electron beam to draw each letter of type on a special television tube. The letters, which can appear on the tube in a wide variety of sizes and type styles, are recorded on photographic material in the typesetter. This material is then used to produce platemaking film. Once the text of the Bible has been entered into the computer, printing plates can be produced in a variety of formats without having to reenter text. In a matter of seconds the computer can decide how a page of the Bible should be composed, and in minutes the phototypesetter can produce a proof that will be used as the basis for making a printing plate that will be used on a printing press.

NEW BIBLE PRESS

The 1981 edition of the New World Translation was printed on a new web offset press specially configured to produce Bibles. This new press is 109 feet (33 m) long​—quite large compared to most Bible presses. It prints on four rolls of thin Bible paper at the same time, producing 128 Bible pages with every impression, or the equivalent of over 2,600 Bibles per hour of running time.

“Our older Bible presses produce only 64 pages per impression,” pointed out a factory overseer. “The new press allows us to print larger sections of the Bible. So there are not as many sections to be sewn together in the bindery, saving time and manpower.”

The new press has other advantages as well. A comparison of the 1981 edition of the New World Translation with previous editions quickly reveals that the new edition is easier to read and visually more pleasing. Why? A new, more delicate typeface was used that might not have stood up well under the pounding of a letterpress, but presents no problems when printed on an offset press. This gives the pages of the 1981 edition a distinctly crisp look. Moreover, when Bibles are printed on letterpresses, it is very difficult to keep the required heavy impression from showing through the page, further darkening it. This show-through problem does not exist when offset printing is used. The advantages of new Bible printing technology are obvious as soon as the 1981 edition of the New World Translation is opened!

MULTI-LANGUAGE COMPUTERIZATION

When the New World Translation was first undertaken, no one expected that it would someday be available in six languages besides English, with the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures available in another four. Today this Bible version is printed in the native tongues of over one billion people who thus can benefit from the textual research and scholarly attention that went into the original English translation.

This retranslation work has been greatly simplified by the literal nature of the English New World Translation itself. “It is nearly impossible to retranslate a paraphrased Bible,” admitted a representative of one of Christendom’s Bible translating societies. Not so with the New World Translation! To date, careful retranslation of the English text, with comparison of the Hebrew and the Greek, has yielded fine results in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Japanese and Swedish. Serious students of God’s Word in many lands now benefit from a translation that courageously restores God’s name, Jehovah, to its proper place in the Biblical text, that is free from the bias of religious traditionalism, and that gives the literal meaning of God’s Word as accurately as possible.

The Watchtower Society’s new computer facilities should be a great help in this ongoing work of multi-language Bible printing. Future editions of the New World Translation, regardless of language, will eventually be entered into a computer and will have the same excellent features as the 1981 English edition.

WORLDWIDE MODERNIZATION

The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures is only the beginning of the Watchtower Society’s conversion to computerized photocomposition and typesetting. The Society’s major printing branches are presently installing modern offset presses. It is hoped that in the near future phototypesetting can be used worldwide to handle pre-press operations for many of the more than 160 languages in which the Society currently prints literature. As a result, faster and more accurate typesetting will reduce the time lapse between the English editions of the Society’s publications and the editions in other languages. The prospect is thrilling indeed!

A large undertaking? Yes, but much has already been accomplished! Let all credit be given to Jehovah God, whose will it is that the “good news” of his Messianic kingdom be preached “in all the inhabited earth,” regardless of the local languages! As long as it is Jehovah’s will that this preaching work continue, the Watchtower Society intends to use every appropriate means to get Jehovah’s Word of truth “to the most distant part of the earth.” (Matt. 24:14; Acts 1:8) How privileged anyone is to be able to participate in this grand work today!

[Box on page 15]

ALL-TIME BEST-SELLER!

The Book of Lists (1977) shows the Bible to be the all-time best-seller, with a distribution of 2,458,000,000. But it acknowledged that to be an incomplete figure and said: “Most likely the actual total figure for Bible sales and distribution . . . would be in the area of 3 billion copies.”​—P. 222.

[Picture on page 11]

Gutenberg’s Press (Replica)