Most translated document?
Yesterday, it was 60 years since the Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations’ General Assembly (that makes the year 1948, just in case you’re in the throws of a mid-week lull and can’t do the maths).
Clearly, that was as great a day for humanity as the day a certain snake tricked poor Eve into eating an apple wasn’t. But it was also the beginning of a long story for the translation industry. The Guiness Book of Records claims said document is the most translated text in the world – available at last count in 337 languages. (This sparked debate in the office as the Holy Bible, as commented on recently by me, is available in over 2000 languages: something must exclude it from the running – probably its confabulated nature.) Many of those languages are ones we, as a translation agency, have never even heard of – Huasteco, anyone? (spoken in Mexico) – and include even the synthetic language, Esperanto.