The most translated document in the world
The most translated document in the world is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948. Guinness World Records lists it as the record holder, and the UN says it can now be read in more than 500 languages.
The text runs to a few pages, and the UN accepts a translation from anyone who can make one for a language not yet in its collection.
What the declaration is
The UN General Assembly adopted the declaration as resolution 217 A at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, by 48 votes to none, with 8 abstentions. The drafting committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. John Peters Humphrey of Canada wrote the outline and René Cassin of France the first draft. Charles Malik of Lebanon was the committee’s rapporteur and P. C. Chang of China its vice-chair.
It has a preamble and 30 articles, and it is not a treaty, so it does not bind anyone in law. Much of it was later written into binding human rights treaties and into national constitutions. The date of adoption is now Human Rights Day, held every 10 December.
How it reached 500 languages
The UN human rights office in Geneva collects the translations, and anyone can submit one for a language that is missing.
The count has grown in steps. Guinness recorded 370 languages and dialects in 2009. In November 2016 the office announced the 501st, North Bolivian Quechua, spoken by about 116,000 people in the La Paz department of Bolivia. The collection also includes versions in sign languages, including British and Spanish Sign Language.
Why linguists and programmers use it
Because every version says the same thing, the declaration works as a parallel text: one passage, hundreds of languages, lined up article by article. That makes it useful for comparing languages and for testing whether software can display a writing system correctly.
The Unicode Consortium hosted a project called the UDHR in Unicode, which turned the translations into clean, consistently encoded files, until January 2024. The files are still maintained on GitHub. The language site Omniglot also collects Article 1 in languages from around the world, grouped by region.
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
It is short enough to compare at a glance, and long enough to show a language’s spelling, its word endings and its script.
Guess the Language uses Article 1 in 128 languages from the UDHR in Unicode files, written in 28 scripts and drawn from 21 language families. Every text says the same thing, so the language itself is the only clue.