7.1. The most translated document in the world

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is our sample document in this chapter. This famous declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and has since become one of the best-known documents in the world. It has been translated into almost 400 languages.^[1] In fact the UDHR holds the Guinness World Record for being the most-translated text in the world! It’s the perfect example for studying language identification, especially since the United Nations makes all the translations easily available online at http://www.ohchr.org/. Figure 7.2 gives you an idea of the range of available translations by showing the UDHR opening sentence in the six official languages of the United Nations.

^[1] As of late 2010 the UDHR was available in 375 different languages and new translation efforts were ongoing.

Figure 7.2. The first sentence of the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish—the six official languages of the United Nations.