Open Contemporary Version (Urdu)

The Biblica Open Urdu Contemporary Version is the open edition of the contemporary translation that Biblica, the organization behind the NIV, maintains in Urdu. Its copyright lists the years 1999, 2005, 2022, 2024, a sign of a text that went through more than one round of work before reaching this edition. Urdu is spoken mainly in Pakistan and India and written in Nastaliq script, right to left. The local title, آزادانہ اردو ہم عصر ترجمہ, means roughly “open contemporary Urdu translation.”

Biblica's contemporary versions translate for meaning: the priority is that each sentence sounds natural in Urdu and is understood on first reading, even when that moves away from the word order of the Hebrew and Greek. It is a text meant to be read aloud, in church and at home.

It serves anyone who reads Urdu and wants a Bible in everyday language, whether for devotional reading or for a first encounter with the text. The honest limit comes from the method itself: by choosing one interpretation to make the text clear, the translation sometimes closes doors the original leaves open. For close study of a word or a construction, compare it with a more literal version.

Biblica has released several of its translations as Biblica Open, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0), with the original available at biblica.com and open.bible. Anyone may read, quote and redistribute the text freely, with credit and under the same license, and that is what makes it possible to offer it here.