New Tibetan Bible

The New Tibetan Bible (དམ་པའི་གསུང་རབ་བོད་འགྱུར་གསར་མ།, NTB) is the work of the New Tibetan Bible Translation Committee, copyright 2016 to 2023, with Wycliffe Bible Translators as a contributor. It stands at the end of a long story: the first Tibetan New Testament was printed in Berlin in 1885, and the complete literary Bible, finished in 1936, was printed in Lahore in 1948. The NTB was made for today's Tibetan reader, in the modern literary register.

The committee itself calls it an essentially literal translation. Tibetan translators produced it through drafting, multiple revisions, community testing and consultant checking against the original languages. That is the process of a base translation, not of a paraphrase.

It serves anyone who reads written Tibetan, from any region: the literary register is shared by speakers of Central, Amdo and Kham varieties, each of which even has its own NTB audio recordings. The honest limit is twofold. Literary Tibetan is not everyday speech, and readers without practice will feel the gap. And closeness to the letter buys precision but sometimes costs fluency. A translation this recent also has yet to stand the test of time.

The rights holder released the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license ("New Tibetan Bible" is a trademark of the committee: a derived translation may not use the name). 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 New Tibetan Bible 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.