World English Bible

The World English Bible (WEB) is an English translation of the Bible published in 2000. It is an updated revision of the American Standard Version (1901). The World English Bible was created by volunteers using the American Standard Version as the base text as part of the ebible.org project through Rainbow Missions, Inc., a Colorado non-profit corporation. The World English Bible is one of the few public domain, twenty-first century English translations of the entire Bible, and it is freely distributed to the public using electronic formats.

The World English Bible claims to be one of the few English-language Bibles custom translated to be understood by most English-speakers worldwide, eliminating the need for data-processing based or computer operating system-specific internationalizations. Work on the World English Bible began in 1997 and it was first known as the American Standard Version 1997.

The World English Bible project was started to produce a modern English Bible version that is not copyrighted, does not use archaic English (such as the KJV), and is not translated into Basic English (such as the Bible in Basic English). The World English Bible follows the American Standard Version's decision to transliterate the Tetragrammaton, but uses "Yahweh" instead of "Jehovah" throughout the Old Testament. The British and Messianic editions as well as the Apocryphal books and New Testament use the traditional forms (e.g., the LORD).

The work is based on the 1901 American Standard Version English translation, the Greek Majority Text, and the Hebrew Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with some minor adjustments made because of alternate readings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. These alternate readings are usually ignored or restricted to the footnotes. The translation process included seven phases of editing and proofreading for each book. An initial automated pass updated approximately 1,000 archaic words, phrases and grammatical constructs. The first manual pass added quotation marks (the ASV had none) and other punctuation and compared the translation to the Greek and Hebrew texts in areas where significant textual variants or meanings were unclear.

All of the text of the World English Bible is deeded into the public domain. The ebible.org project maintains a trademark on the phrase "World English Bible" and forbids any derivative work that substantially alters the text from using the name "World English Bible" to describe it. The reasons given were that they felt copyright was an ineffective way of protecting the text's integrity and the fact that the Creative Commons licenses did not exist at the time the project began and thus, since the decision to place the text in the public domain had already been made, "it is way too late to change that decision" after the fact.