Which translation this site quotes, and why

Why the default is a public-domain text

The World English Bible can be reproduced without publisher permission. That allows complete cited passages to appear wherever an English page includes Scripture and allows the text to be redistributed in authorized data outputs. Copyrighted alternatives are offered only where their terms permit, which is why the World English Bible is the default.

The alternatives are offered because readers have preferences and because comparison is genuinely useful. The picker records which translation produced the text on screen, so a passage is never labelled as one edition while showing another.

Generated, not typed

The public-domain texts come from pinned source files whose source, retrieval date, and content hash are recorded. Quotation changes are reproduced from those sources and checked against their recorded identity rather than edited in place. That record makes the displayed edition identifiable.

This exists because the alternative failed. Hand-maintained Scripture drifts: a word gets normalised, a punctuation mark modernised, a verse quietly conformed to what the writer remembered. Each change is small and none is visible in review, and after enough of them the text on the page is nobody’s edition.

The copyrighted texts, and their limits

The picker labels the text it actually displays. If a translation has no text for a cited verse, the reader sees the public-domain fallback with that fallback named, rather than a passage mislabelled as another edition. The New International, English Standard, Common English Bible, and NRSVue readings remain their publishers’ property, and their inclusion grants no right to redistribute them. Their licence limits also govern how much of each edition may appear across the site.

Spoken lines get an additional check. When a character in the story says something drawn from Scripture, that line has to be a strict verbatim slice of the cited verse — the same words, the same punctuation — rather than a paraphrase presented in quotation marks. A speech bubble asserts that someone said this, and a loose rendering inside one is a small fabrication.

The attribution is checked as well as the wording. A verbatim quotation can still be put in the wrong mouth, and a verse spoken jointly, or reported rather than quoted, stays on a verse card instead of becoming dialogue. Narration that summarises what Acts reports is written as narration, not dressed up as speech.

The King James text is public domain in most of the world, but in the United Kingdom rights in the Authorized Version are vested in the Crown and administered by its patentees. This site is readable worldwide and does not geoblock, so that limitation is recorded rather than ignored.