Buk Baibel

The Buk Baibel is the Tok Pisin Bible of the Bible Society of Papua New Guinea, copyright 1969 to 2008. The complete edition came out in 1989 and became the country's common Bible. Tok Pisin is an English-based creole and one of Papua New Guinea's official languages, the bridge between speakers of hundreds of different languages.

The text shows a meaning-based translation that would rather explain than copy form. John 3:16 becomes God i gat wanpela Pikinini tasol i stap, "God has only one Son", and in Psalm 23 the Lord is wasman bilong mi, the watchman who looks after me. Tok Pisin's compact vocabulary forces ideas to be built out of phrases, and the translation does so without apology.

It works very well read aloud, in worship and for everyday Tok Pisin speakers; fittingly, there is an audio recording by Faith Comes by Hearing. The honest limit comes from the method itself: when a translation explains, it picks an interpretation, and technical terms of the original sometimes dissolve into paraphrase. For close word study, compare it with a more literal translation.

The rights holder released the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. It allows anyone to read and share it for free, as long as the text stays unaltered and is not used commercially. That is why the Buk Baibel is here in full to read for free on Midvash, but is left out of the public API, audio and AI features, which would go beyond what the license allows.