For more than 75 years, Wycliffe has helped people around the world translate the Bible into their own languages. In 1917 a missionary named William Cameron Townsend went to Guatemala to sell Spanish Bibles. But he was shocked when many people couldn’t understand the books. They spoke Cakchiquel, a language without a Bible. Cam believed everyone should understand the Bible, so he started a linguistics school (the Summer Institute of Linguistics, known today as SIL) that trained people to do Bible translation. The work continued to grow, and in 1942 Cam officially founded Wycliffe Bible Translators. Over the following decades, Wycliffe celebrated many milestones — from the first translation completed in 1951, all the way to the 500th translation completed in 2000. Around the same time, Wycliffe adopted a new challenge — a goal of seeing a Bible translation project started in every language still needing one by 2025. We believe that Bible translation is most transformational as a locally led, sustainable ministry of the church. Wycliffe USA serves together with churches and Bible translation organizations around the world so that local churches have Scripture and other resources to meet their spiritual needs, along with the capacity to continue to meet those growing needs in the future.