The modern Hindi language and Urdu language are mutually intelligible in colloquial form, but use different scripts when written, and have mutually unintelligible literary forms. The history of Bible translations into Hindi and Urdu is closely linked, with the early translators of "Hindustani" simply producing the same version with different fonts.
Contents
The first translation of part of the Bible in Hindi, Genesis, was made in manuscript by Benjamin Schultze (1689-1760), a German Missionary, who arrived in India to establish an English mission in 1726 and worked on completing Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's Bible translations into Tamil and then Bible translations into Telugu. His translation of parts of Genesis was published in Halle in 1745 along with a grammar of the local Hindi language he had encountered in Madras.
Hindi
John 3:16 क्योंकि परमेश्वर ने जगत से ऐसा प्रेम रखा कि उस ने अपना एकलौता पुत्र दे दिया, ताकि जो कोई उस पर विश्वास करे, वह नाश न हो, परन्तु अनन्त जीवन पाए।
As with Bible translations into Bengali (his own work), and into Oriya, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Assamese (with the aid of local scholars) an important early stage of the Hindi Bible rests with the work of William Carey in Serampore. Though this had to be revised by John Parsons of Monghyr. Carey attracted also the interest of Henry Martyn, later of Persia, to Hindi. Presbyterian Samuel H. Kellogg who taught at the seminary in Allahabad headed three translators working on translation of the Old Testament into Hindi, including William Hooper, of the Church Missionary Society, and Joseph Arthur Lambert. Kellogg's Hindi Grammar (1876, 1893) is still consulted today. However, 18 years after Kellogg's death in 1899, Edwin Greaves of the London Missionary Society, and author of a Grammar of Modern Hindi (1896, 1908, 1921), in 1917 signalled his concerns about the adequacy of Hindi Bible translations in his Report on Protestant Hindi Christian literature.
In 2009, Jehovah's Witnesses released नयी दुनिया अनुवाद मसीही यूनानी शास्त्र, a translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (the New Testament)into Hindi and then, in 2016, released पवित्र शास्त्र का नयी दुनिया अनुवाद, a translation of the entire Bible into Hindi.
Urdu
The Bible was first published in the Urdu language in 1843, though the New Testament was published by Benjamin Shultze of the Danish Mission in 1745. Robert Cotton Mather printed new editions at Mirzapur in 1870.
Revisions were published in 1989, 1998 and 2005. The Bible is written in Nastaʿlīq script but was also available in Roman Urdu script from the Bible Society of India until the 1960s. In 2004 the Bible was made available online, but in PDF or image format only, due to the difficulties of typesetting the Nastaʿlīq script. In 2009 a Unicode version was made available beginning with the New Testament. The complete Bible online in Unicode is also available. International Bible Society also published New Urdu Version of Bible, this version is based on New International Version of Bible.
In 2016, Jehovah's Witnesses released کتابِ مُقدس کا ترجمہ نئی دُنیا, a translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures ترجمہ نئی دُنیا—متی سے مکاشفہ (the New Testament) in Urdu.