The World English Bible claims to be one of the few English-language Bibles custom translated to be understood by most English-speakers worldwide, eliminating the need for data-processing based or computer operating system-specific internationalizations. Work on the World English Bible began in 1997 and it was first known as the American Standard Version 1997. The World English Bible project was started in order to produce a modern EnglishBible version that is not copyrighted, does not use archaic English, and is not translated into Basic English. The World English Bible follows the American Standard Version's decision to transliterate the Tetragrammaton, but uses "Yahweh" instead of "Jehovah" throughout the Old Testament. The British and Messianic editions as well as the Apocryphal books and New Testament use the traditional forms. The translation also includes the following Apocryphal books :
The work is based on the 1901 American Standard Version English translation, the Greek Majority Text, and the Hebrew Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with some minor adjustments made because of alternate readings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. These alternate readings are usually ignored or restricted to the footnotes. The translation process included seven passes of editing and proofreading for each book. An initial automated pass updated approximately 1,000 archaic words, phrases and grammatical constructs. The first manual pass added quotation marks and other punctuation and compared the translation to the Greek and Hebrew texts in areas where significant textual variants or meanings were unclear.
Licensing
All of the text of the World English Bible is deeded into the public domain. The ebible.org project maintains a trademark on the phrase "World English Bible" and forbids any derivative work that substantially alters the text from using the name "World English Bible" to describe it. The reasons given were that they felt copyright was an ineffective way of protecting the text's integrity and the fact that the Creative Commons licenses did not exist at the time the project began and thus, since the decision to place the text in the public domain had already been made, "it is way too late to change that decision" after the fact.
Critical reception
Evangelical site GotQuestions.org praised the WEB for being "a modern, free, and public domain English translation of the Bible" while also criticising the translation's sentence structure as "not always in the most natural-sounding and free-flowing English". The site suggests the lack of physical print copies has made the translation difficult for widespread adoption by Christian communities. The Provident Planning web site uses the World English Bible because it is free of copyright restrictions and because the author considers it to be a good translation. The Bible Megasite review of the World English Bible says it is a good revision of the American Standard Version of 1901 into contemporary English, which also corrects some textual issues with the ASV. The World English Bible is widely published in digital formats by a variety of publishers.
