© 2016 Georges Michelson-Dupont
© 2016 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Friendship | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 74 — June 2016 | The Diffusion of the Urantia Book in the World Projection 2015-2100 |
MEETING OF TRANSLATORS IN GONESSE (FRANCE) IN 1996
From top left to right: Andrei Reznikov (Russia), Nienke Grugman-Begemann (Holland), Seppo Kanerva (Finland), Kwan Choi (Korea), Michael Hanian (Russia), Guiseppe Zechinato (Italy), Marlène Michelson Dupont, Georges Michelson-Dupont (Trustee France), Richard Keeler (_Trustee US_A), Jacques Dupont (France), Harald Kempf (Germany), Patricia Mandelius-Sadler (Trustee and President of Urantia Foundation), Nicole Ruchti & Urs Ruchti (Germany), Peep Sober (Estonia) Joel Rehnström (Sweden), Seppo Niskanen (Finland), Natalia Shidlovskaya (Russia), Vadim Knorre (Russia) Jean Royer (France). Crouching:. Tom Burns (Trustee USA), Antonio Moya Serpa (Spain), Philip Rollnick (Trustee USA).
Disseminating the teachings of The Urantia Book on the planet involves translating it as faithfully as possible and making these translations available. As you can imagine, this represents a considerable amount of work given the complexity of certain concepts and the importance of the work, which includes no fewer than 18,902 paragraphs spread over 2,196 pages.
In order to define a strategy and procedures for organizing and coordinating the work of the translation and revision teams, two meetings bringing together more than 12 translators as well as the trustees were organized in the Paris region in 1996 and 1997.
During these meetings, a plan for the production of quality translations was developed covering the period from 1996 to 2030 with the goal of providing access to the teachings of The Urantia Book to 70% of the world’s population in their native language.
We provide the progress of this plan in the table below.
Georges Michelson-Dupont
Urantia Foundation Translation Manager
¶ Some Statistics provided by the Urantia Foundation
Below is a summary table of the translations published by the Foundation and the number of potential speakers who can read the revelation in their language.
The second column is the year of publication, the third column indicates the number of speakers speaking the language whose countries have only one official language, for example Germany, the fourth column indicates the number of speakers whose countries have two official languages, for example Senegal, the fifth column indicates the percentage of potential speakers who can read the revelation in their language compared to the world population of 7.4 billion human beings.
| English | 1955 | 34 1000 000 | 487,000,000 | 6.58% |
| French | 1961 | 7,7000,000 | 128,000,000 | 1.73% |
| Spanish | 1993 | 350,000,000 | 410,000,000 | 5.54% |
| Finish | 1993 | 5,500,000 | 5,500,000 | 0.07% |
| Dutch | 1997 | 21,000,000 | 21,000,000 | 0.28% |
| Russian | 1997 | 167,000,000 | 277,000,000 | 3.74% |
| Korean | 1998 | 78,000,000 | 78,000,000 | 1.05% |
| Portuguese | 2003 | 176,000,000 | 191,000,000 | 2.58% |
| Lithuanian | 2004 | 3,000,000 | 3,000,000 | 0.04% |
| Romanian | 2004 | 24,000,000 | 24,000,000 | 0.32% |
| German | 2005 | 121,000,000 | 128,000,000 | 1.73% |
| Italian | 2006 | 59,000,000 | 59,000,000 | 0.80% |
| Magyar | 2010 | 10,000,000 | 10,000,000 | 0.14% |
| Swedish | 2010 | 8,700,000 | 8,700,000 | 0.12% |
| Polish | 2010 | 40,000,000 | 40,000,000 | 0.54% |
| Bulgarian | 2014 | 20,000,000 | 20,000,000 | 0.27% |
| Czech | 2017 | 10,000,000 | 10,000,000 | 0.14% |
| Indonesian | 2018 | 43,000,000 | 155,000,000 | 2.09% |
| Chinese | 2020 | 146,755,000 | 1,343,755,000 | 18.16% |
| Persian | 2025 | 45,500,000 | 77,500,000 | 1.05% |
| Japanese | 2025 | 125,000,000 | 126,000,000 | 1.70% |
| TOTAL POPULATION | 2025 | 2,872,780,000 | 603,780,000 | 48.68% |
| Friendship | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 74 — June 2016 | The Diffusion of the Urantia Book in the World Projection 2015-2100 |