Catholic Translation Work
The first translations of the Bible into Chinese were made by Catholic missionaries. However, they were only manuscript copies. The first Catholic Chinese Bible to be published was started by a young Franciscan friar named Gabriele Allegra, who began translating the Old Testament from the original Hebrew and Aramaic languages in 1935. Ten years later he recruited Friars Solanus Lee, Antonius Lee, Bernardinus Lee, and Ludovicus Liu in Beijing. However, due to the Chinese civil war in 1948, the friars were forced to move the Studium Biblicum in Hong Kong. After twenty years of effort, the first Old Testament was published in 1954. In 1968 the New and Old Testaments were published in a single volume.
John C. Wu, a Catholic convert, who served as the Republic of China's minister to the Vatican, also made a translation of the New Testament and the Psalms into Classical Chinese in 1946. The translations were not direct and often noted to be florid, and his translation of the Psalms were paraphrases.
Read more about this topic: Bible Translations Into Chinese
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