"Which Bible translation is the best one?" There are so many English Bible versions and they are so different that it is impossible to generally say which is the best one. The Bible is indeed a very special book or rather a collection of 66 books: Written over a period of about 1500 years, on three different continents ( Asia, Europe, Africa), in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) by about forty writers, it claims to be the Word of God. It has been read by people of all social and educational backgrounds, age groups, and nationalities, and its universal relevance made it the all-time world best-seller. Almost from the beginning the story of the Bible was also a story of translation. Starting with the Septuagint in the third century BC, the Bible was translated into other languages. However, during the centuries which followed only relatively few languages received Bible translations. Even by the time of the invention of printing, approximately 500 years ago, only 33 languages had anything of the Bible, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century 71 languages possessed anything of the Scriptures (Nida 1975: 24).During the last two hundred years, and especially in the twentieth century, an enormous progress has been made in Bible translating. By the end of 1984, 286 languages had received the entire Bible and 594 additional languages the New Testament. No fewer than 1808 languages had at least some portion of the Scriptures (De Waard and Nida 1986: 21). Although these languages represent about 97% of the world's population, the process of Bible translation will go on, since "those who do not as yet have anything of the Scriptures represent at least another thousand languages which should have something" (De Waard and Nida 1986: 21). The history of English translations goes back at least to John Wyclif and William Tyndale, not to mention any Old English translations. A landmark was certainly the "Authorized Version" or "King James Bible" of 1611 which even now, at the end of the twentieth century, is still very popular and has certainly had a greater impact on the English speaking world than any other version of the Bible. However, there are many other English Bibles. According to Smalley (19991: 37), 450 translations into English have been made, many of them in the past few decades. The "Authorized Version" has increasingly been replaced in private and public use and today "the variety of Bible translations present in any congregation on a given Sunday morning would astonish churchgoers of the 1940s and 1950s" (Sheeley and Nash 1997: 32).