Category: News

Whether you call it Spring Festival, Chinese Lunar New Year, or simply Chinese New Year, this year, this most important of Chinese holidays will take place tomorrow, February 3. To prepare for this event, over the past several months, incredible YouVersion volunteers have been working together with our team to bring Traditional and Simplified Chinese to the Bible App™and to YouVersion.com. Now, wherever they are, Chinese readers can experience God’s Word in their “heart language,” not only in the Bible translation they’re enjoying, but in many of YouVersion’s interfaces as well. 管你是否称它为春节，中国的农历新年，或者就称之为中国新年，今年中国最重要的节日，就是今天，2月3日。为了这一节日，在过去的几个月中，YouVersion 志愿者们一直在努力工作以便推出简体中文和繁体中文版的圣经应用程序。不管在哪里，华人都可以用他们的“母语”阅读神的话语，不仅可以读中文版的圣经，还可以浏览中文版的 YouVersion 界面。

For thousands of years, the Chinese Lunar New Year has been a celebration to release the past, an opportunity to wish for peace and genuine happiness for all people. Because of its rich tradition and powerful message, Chinese New Year is the most popular of all holidays for Chinese-speaking people all over the world. 几千年来，中国农历新年都是一个辞旧迎新的庆典，是一个为人民祈求和平和幸福的时刻。因为其悠久的传统和丰富的内涵，这个节日对世界各地的华人而言都是最受欢迎的节日。

2011 is the Year of the Golden Rabbit, or Xin Mao. The rabbit symbolizes both wisdom and goodwill. This year is anticipated to be filled with good luck, calm and peace. During the traditional Spring Festival celebration, Chinese families and friends will gather to exchange gifts and spend time together, expressing loving thoughts and warm tidings for each other. 2011年是农历辛卯年或兔年。兔子象征了智慧和友好。华人希望这是一个幸运年，是和平幸福年。在传统的春节庆祝过程中，中国家庭将团聚在一起，互赠礼物，相互表达关心和美好祝福。

Our vision has always been to make the Scriptures freely available and as easy to use as possible, for as many people as we can. We believe the Bible represents the gift of God’s wisdom and His words to all of us. This Chinese New Year, please let all of your friends know—through direct conversations, phone calls, emails, on Facebook and Twitter—about this wonderful opportunity our language partners have given us to share the free gift of God’s wisdom and goodwill with our Chinese friends everywhere. 我们的异象一直是将圣经以最便捷的方式，免费送达到更多的人手中。我们相信圣经代表了神的智慧，是神给我们大家的礼物。值此中国农历春节之际，请通过面对面的交流，电话，邮件或者 Facebook 、Twitter 等方式，让您所有的朋友共享我们的中文翻译伙伴帮助提供给华人的免费新年礼物— 使用 YouVersion 随时随地地分享神智慧的话语和祝福。

Answer: “When 1 billion minutes was your goal.”

In this video, Terry Storch, Digerati Pastor at LifeChurch.tv, and Bobby Gruenewald, Innovation Leader at LifeChurch.tv, update us on YouVersion’s “1 Billion in January” challenge.

When we announced our goal for a billion minutes, the most we’d seen read in the Bible App™ during a single month was 250 million. Last month, you read 681 million minutes. That’s an increase of 172%! Incredible! While we didn’t hit 1 billion in 31 days, we’re still on track to do it in the first 50 days of 2011. Please keep making God’s Word a part of your life every day, and the moment we reach 1 billion, we’ll celebrate it here on our blog and on Facebook and Twitter.

We’d be honored to have your help spreading the Word. You can participate in lots of ways:

• Rate the Bible App in iTunes.
• Help friends install the Bible App on their mobile devices.
• Mention YouVersion in Facebook status updates and @YouVersion on Twitter.
• If you have a blog, please consider writing about what we’re doing and inviting your readers to participate.
• Sign up as a YouVersion volunteer.

If you’ve had trouble getting timely assistance for your problems with the Bible App™, you’re not alone. And for that, we would like to sincerely apologize. At YouVersion, we’ve always focused most of our resources on making the Bible as widely available as possible. And because we move so fast, most of our support has traditionally come from our awesome volunteers.

But we want to do more.

We recently realized that we’ve been receiving up to a few hundred support requests every day. Today, we’re addressing that need specifically. We’d like to introduce you to our newest team member, Ben Armstrong, User Support Coordinator for YouVersion. (That’s Ben at the right, hard at work, surfing a tube slide.) Ben will be answering your questions, developing tutorials, writing how-to’s and building out a more comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions list for you.

We’ve always wanted to make the Bible App the best app on your mobile device, whether paid or free. But we’d also like to give you better support than you could get even if you were paying for it. And, we even want to make that happen in all the languages we support.

For those of you who have may have already met Ben during the last week, you know he’s awesome. But Ben won’t be able to do it alone. He’ll need your help. What can you do to help us make YouVersion support fantastic? Here are just a few areas where we already know we could use your assistance:

• Building “how-to” tutorials
• Answering support tickets
• Monitoring YouVersion’s Facebook page and responding to issues
• Responding to support requests to @YouVersion on Twitter

If you can help, please sign up here, and be sure you choose “customer support”!

We’re excited to announce that the Sharif Arabic Bible (SAB) is now available for the Bible App™ and at YouVersion.com! The Sharif Bible is a complete translation of the Bible in Arabic, with special attention given to making the truths of the Gospel accessible to Arab readers.

While we’re thrilled to share this wonderful version with you, we’re even happier that we also get to offer it to you in offline form. This means that if you download it to your mobile device, you can have access to the Sharif Arabic Bible even when you’re not connected to the Internet or to your data provider. (See the instructions below.)

We’re so grateful to the International Sharif Bible Society for making this possible. With more than 1.2 million copies distributed so far, the Sharif Arabic Bible was first published in 1990, then updated in 2000. You can learn more about the Sharif Arabic Bible at www.sharifbible.com. (Note: This site is in Arabic.)

How to Download the SAB

iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch: From the Bible reader, tap the top bar, where the current translation is presently displayed. All versions display in alphabetical order by language. (You’ll find the Sharif Arabic Bible under AR for Arabic, near the top.) Tap the download icon (a green box with a white arrow pointing downward) on the right and follow the instructions.

Android: From the Bible reader, tap the top bar, where the current translation is presently displayed. Tap the box at the top right that displays the version short code. All available Bible versions display. (You’ll find the Sharif Arabic Bible under AR for Arabic.) Tap the download icon (with an arrow pointing down) on the right. That’s it!