The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures was published in 1961 by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, a corporation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The translation project began in 1950 and was carried out by a committee of church leaders who sought to produce a Bible with updated language based on the original Greek and Hebrew sources. Over the next ten years, parts of the Old and New Testaments were published separately until the translation was completed in 1961. Today, the New World Translation has been translated into dozens of languages and hundreds of millions of copies have been distributed worldwide.