How they set the Guinness World Record. Twice.
Come and See is translating The Chosen into 600 languages to reach 95% of the world. When the well-resourced languages ran out, one expert plus the system reached places where traditional teams can't go — and the record fell again.
A billion people. In the language they pray in.
Come and See, a faith-based nonprofit, set out to share the story of Jesus with at least a billion people. Their flagship effort translates all seven seasons of The Chosen — the first multi-season series about Jesus's life — into 600 languages, reaching 95% of the world. The series has already reached over 280 million viewers across 175 countries.
People need to hear the story in the language they speak, dream, and pray in.
86 languages, the traditional way.
The first record came where the playbook works: well-resourced languages — Spanish, French, Portuguese, Mandarin — with linguists, theologians, and biblical scholars on hand. A 200-strong team ran a proven batch process: draft, review, revise, approve.
- Multiple translators per language
- Dedicated reviewers and QA specialists
- Voice actors for dubbed versions
- Project management across every handoff
When you exhaust the high-resource languages, the playbook changes. Going from 86 to 600 means languages where finding even one qualified biblical scholar isn't a given.
One expert, fully amplified.
These records were set with Codex — our desktop translation editor. Aquilla is Codex reborn on the web: the same lean-translation engine that broke the record, now collaborative, cloud-native, and free to open in a browser. Every lesson and every hard-won fix from the desktop years moved with it.
The expert steers
A linear pipeline — draft → provider → SME → reviewers → audio → dubbing — adds delay and cost at every handoff, and it falls apart where expertise is scarce. Aquilla flips it: one expert steers, and the system does the rest of the work alongside them.
Living Memory
Not a string database — the team's intent. As the expert works, Aquilla captures the project's voice, terminology, and standards, so every suggestion stays consistent with the work already trusted.
Quality built in, not bolted on
Real-time feedback replaces weeks-long review cycles. Checking happens in the same flow as drafting, so quality is embedded as the work is made — not inspected after the fact.
125 languages — into places teams can't reach.
At ChosenCon in Charlotte, Guinness World Records recognized the most translated season of a streaming series: 125 languages for Season 1 of The Chosen. The 39 new languages added since September — Arabic, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Haitian, Hindi, Korean, Slovenian, Turkish, Vietnamese, and more — were carried in low-resource contexts where many languages had just one subject-matter expert, delivering what once required a full team.
Every file makes the next one faster.
Living Memory compounds. Each completed file teaches the system more about the project's voice, terminology, and standards — so files started later finish faster per unit of work. Across 1,224 files and over 100 projects, the trend holds.
People need to hear the story of Jesus in their own language — the language they speak, dream, and pray in.
Six seasons into 600 languages is 33,000 episodes. It's reachable on one principle: amplify expertise instead of multiplying handoffs. The expert steers. The system learns. Quality is built in, not bolted on.
Scale your translation, not your team.
Whether you're reaching into low-resource languages or speeding up the work you already do, Aquilla gives one expert maximum leverage. It's free, and it's live today.