Although the Sphere Handbook was compiled and written in English, contributions were provided from all over the world. In order to acknowledge this and to enable the use of Sphere globally, the Sphere Handbook has been translated into a number of different languages.

The Sphere Project Office operates trilingually, in English, French and Spanish. As a result it has directly coordinated the translation and production of the Handbook into these languages as well as in a few other widely used languages:

2000 Edition	2004 Edition
Arabic	English
French	Arabic
Portuguese	French
Russian	Russian
Spanish	Spanish
Swahili

However, most of the translated versions of the Handbook were produced spontaneously in response to local demands. The 2000 edition was translated into over 20 languages in total, including Chinese, Indonesian, and Turkish. The 2004 edition has already been locally translated into 11 languages, and is currently being further translated into other languages too.

Most of the following versions are available in hardcopy upon request at:
(except the ones with a *)

2000 Edition		2004 Edition
Albanian	Latvian	Dari
Bahasa Indonesian	Lithuanian	Farsi *
Bangla	Macedonian	Japanese
Bosnian *	Korean (North)	Oriya *
Bulgarian *	Pashto	Vietnamese
Chinese	Polish *	Nepali
Croatian *	Romanian *	Sinhala
Czech	Serbian	Urdu
Dari	Slovak *	Chinese
Estonian *	Slovenian *	Bahasa
Farsi	Turkish	Malayala *
Hungarian *	Urdu	Tamil
		Korean

Sphere encourages the translation of the Handbook, as this is seen as an important way of disseminating Sphere and of ensuring ownership at the local level. In order to ensure that translations duly reflect the original text, the Sphere Office has developped translation guidelines. However, given that Sphere does not have the resources to operate further quality control mechanisms, all locally translated versions of the Handbook are submitted to a disclaimer.

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