Verbum

Why these twelve

Verbum ships with 12 Bible translations across 5 languages. Most online Bible apps offer either two (KJV and one modern English) or several dozen. Twelve is a deliberate middle: enough breadth that comparison is meaningful, narrow enough that we could ensure each one was carefully sourced, checked, and represented in the comparison view.

The list

| Language | Translations | |---|---| | English | KJV, BBE, ASV, WEB, Darby | | Portuguese | NVI, RA, ACF | | Spanish | RVR1960 | | French | APEE | | German | Luther 1545, Neue Genfer Übersetzung |

All twelve are either public domain or licensed for free public use. None have license restrictions that would prevent shipping the full text inside a free app.

English: five translations, three eras

KJV (1611, revised 1769) is the still-canonical English Bible. Beautiful, hieratic, syntactically Hebrew-inflected. Required reading because so much downstream English Christianity quotes it idiomatically. KJV's translator annotations (the curly-bracket {Heb. ...} notes) are preserved in the source data; the reader can toggle them off.

ASV (1901) — American Standard Version. The KJV's grandchild, more literal, less elegant. The base text for the NASB and the RSV families. Useful in the comparison view precisely because it shows how the KJV's choices were revised once 19th-century textual scholarship caught up to its base text.

BBE (1949) — Bible in Basic English. Translated using a controlled vocabulary of about 1,000 words. Clumsy as literature, fascinating as a diagnostic. If you can't follow a passage in BBE, the difficulty is in the meaning, not the vocabulary.

WEB (2000s) — World English Bible. Public-domain modern English translation, ASV-derived. Reads cleaner than KJV without losing literalness. A reasonable default if you want something modern that you can quote without copyright concerns.

Darby (1890) — extremely literal, idiosyncratic. Useful for word study because Darby aggressively preserves grammatical structure. Less useful for devotional reading.

Portuguese: three translations, three audiences

NVI — Nova Versão Internacional. The Brazilian-Portuguese Evangelical default. Modern, readable, balanced. The translation most likely to be used in Brazilian church Bible study programs and in Spotify devotionals.

RA — Almeida Revista e Atualizada. The historic Almeida text revised in the 1990s. Formal-equivalent (more literal than NVI), uses traditional Portuguese ecclesiastical vocabulary. The Catholic-and-Reformed crossover text in Brazil. Older readers and academic settings prefer it.

ACF — Almeida Corrigida Fiel. The Textus Receptus stream of Almeida — this is the Portuguese equivalent of preferring the KJV's underlying Greek text over the modern eclectic critical text. Used by communities that distrust modern textual criticism. In the comparison view, ACF's variants from RA on disputed passages (1 John 5:7, John 7:53–8:11, Mark 16:9–20) reveal exactly how the translator's textual choices ripple into the receptor language.

Spanish: one anchor

RVR1960 — Reina-Valera Revisión 1960. The single most-read Spanish Bible by a wide margin. Spanish-speaking Reformed and Evangelical churches use it almost universally. Verbum's Spanish-language users get this translation as the default, with the multi-translation comparison reserved for English when needed.

We considered shipping NVI (Spanish) and the Biblia de las Américas, but neither has the ecclesial centrality of RVR for the audience Verbum expects.

French and German: minimum-viable representation

APEE (French) — Alliance Biblique Universelle's modern French translation. One translation per language is enough for a v1 launch in French; we'll add La Sainte Bible (Louis Segond 1910) in v1.1 if there's demand.

Luther 1545 and Neue Genfer Übersetzung for German. Same logic as Portuguese: one historical, one modern. Luther 1545 is the foundational German text, the rough analogue to the KJV. Neue Genfer is contemporary, dynamic-equivalent, used in modern Reformed churches.

What's not in (yet)

  • Hebrew Masoretic Text and Greek SBLGNT — these are in Verbum but rendered through the interlinear reader, not through the standard verse view. They are not "translations" in the user-facing sense.
  • NIV, ESV, NASB, NLT (English) — all proprietary, all expensive to license. We don't ship copyrighted modern English translations because the licensing terms typically prohibit free redistribution.
  • NRSV, RSV — restrictive license terms for digital redistribution even though academic use is permitted. Not worth the legal complexity for a free app.
  • Italian, Russian, Korean, Mandarin — not on the v1 roadmap. The language list reflects the audiences the project owner can validate by reading. Adding a language without a native speaker on the team would produce mojibake bugs we couldn't detect, which we have learned the hard way.

Using the comparison view

Open the comparison view. Pick John 1:1. Add 6–8 translations. Read them in sequence:

KJV — In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

NVI — No princípio era aquele que é a Palavra, e a Palavra estava com Deus, e a Palavra era Deus.

RVR — En el principio era el Verbo, y el Verbo era con Dios, y el Verbo era Dios.

Luther — Im Anfang war das Wort, und das Wort war bei Gott, und Gott war das Wort.

Notice that NVI says aquele que é a Palavra — "the one who is the Word", inserting an interpretive gloss that none of the other translations do. This is the kind of decision that comparison view makes visible. KJV and RVR keep "Word" / "Verbo" without elaboration; NVI smuggles in the grammatical subject.

Whether NVI's gloss is helpful or tendentious is a debate. Verbum's job is just to put the gloss next to the alternatives so the debate can happen with the texts in view. That is most of what comparing translations is for.

Open the comparison view. Try Romans 7:24 across all twelve. The interpretive choices on a single Pauline lament will tell you more about translation philosophy than any meta-commentary.