William Cameron Townsend (July 9, 1896 – April 23, 1982) was an American Christian missionary-linguist and the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International).

Born in 1896 in Southern California, Townsend graduated from Santa Ana High School and attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Townsend was concerned that CAM's Christian message, spread exclusively in Spanish, could not reach the monolingual majority of the indigenous population.

[3]: 42–43 He settled in a Kaqchikel community on the coast called Santa Catarina, and over the next fourteen years he learned the language to the point where he could translate the Bible.

He also founded the Robinson Bible Institute which, with financial backing from U.S. sources, built a center for the indigenous community that included a school, medical clinic, an electrical generator, a coffee processing plant, and an agricultural supply store.

[4]: 38  During these years, Townsend's concern for the indigenous community grew, and he became convinced that the missionary practices he observed did not address their needs effectively and did not take into account their diverse languages and cultures.

According to Colby and Dennet, Townsend's CAM superiors also showed signs of unease that he had adopted indigenous cultural practices, clothing, and language.

As this Bible translation movement developed, Townsend moved from Guatemala to Mexico to Peru, with a special focus on the vast Amazon basin.

[7] Townsend proposed using airplanes and radios to stay connected with the isolated tribes, but the financial and timely costs of new technology for such labor-intensive work was off-putting to many mission groups.

Townsend always claimed that SIL was an academic institution that applied original linguistic research to the solution of human problems and to the creation of an indigenous literature that included both the collection and publication in written form of previously oral histories and stories and the translation of "works of high moral value", especially the Bible, but also often including the sections of national constitutions most relevant to indigenous rights, and later the translation of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

He explained that, although SIL was not a religious institution per se, its members were lay Christians motivated by their faith to serve the minority language groups of the world.

However, their vision included, among many other humanitarian goals, that of providing minority language communities with access to the Bible, and then trusting that the Christian Scriptures would bring about positive spiritual and material transformations in individuals and societies.

Because the Mexican government did not allow missionary work through its educational system, Townsend founded Wycliffe Bible Translators as a separate organization from SIL.

The following year, after a training session with five men in attendance (including Kenneth Pike who would become a lifelong friend and prominent academic linguist), Townsend took his students to Mexico to begin field work.

In 1940, Townsend wrote a short book (80 pages) in English explaining the abuses of international oil companies in Mexico and defending the Cardenas government's nationalization of them.

Townsend was the subject of the highly critical book Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil by journalists Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett.