F ifty years ago, the only realistic model for Bible translation was for a missionary couple to go to a language group and work on the entire translation process themselves—linguistic analysis, translation advising, consulting and typing, literacy work, etc. Things have changed a lot since then, thanks in large part to technology.
Perhaps the most obvious impact of technology is that it provides a wealth of software to help facilitate the process. Translation teams use a software called Paratext to draft and check their text in a way that will format the text for eventual publication. It allows comparison of a given verse against its counterpart in any existing published translation or version. And it contains numerous tools to help check for errors in this huge body of text. Paratext is just one of the dozens of useful software tools in the translation process; another notable program is the Fieldworks Language Explorer used for vocabulary gathering and linguistic analysis.
Technology—and an increase in worldwide technological literacy—now allows native speakers to do the actual translation work in most contexts. It’s now realistic to both train locals with the basic computer skills needed to do Bible translation, and equip them with the computer technology for the job. This results in a far more effective translation process with a natural- sounding result than one based on a foreign missionary’s attempts to learn the language well enough to do the translation themselves.
Related: Bible translation isn’t easy, but the holistic process is key
Technology allows job specialization in translation efforts
Technology allows missionaries working in Bible translation to specialize. Rather than the somewhat ineffective task of one missionary couple working as a jack-of-all-trades in the translation process, missionary staff can focus on a specific aspect:
- Some serve as translation advisors, working with a team of native speakers for one particular translation project to guide and facilitate the translation process and offer suggestions based on their specialized knowledge of biblical studies and biblical languages.
- Some serve as translation consultants, serving many language groups to check a translation draft. They won’t learn any particular translation language themselves, but they are trained to know what questions generally need to be asked of each biblical passage to ensure that the team understands the original meaning of the text and that they have communicated that meaning accurately.
- Some serve as linguists to prepare for the translation by developing an alphabet for the language (which likely has never been written down before) and to study the grammar to understand the complexities that would be involved in translating into this language. Translation is much, much more complicated than simply going through word by word, because the grammars of different languages are completely different. This needs to be studied and understood.
- Some serve as literacy or education workers, helping the community learn to read their newly written language so that they will be able to read the Bible, not to mention other written materials that can and should now be produced for the language community.
- Some (including myself) serve other roles in the translation process such as typesetting—preparing the completed translation for publication and printing.
There are several other roles too that I haven’t mentioned that relate in some fairly direct way to the translation process. Plus, there are support roles in administration, finance, human resources, library, IT, etc. Bible translation takes a lot of people. In SIL Ethiopia, my own entity of service, we don’t think of ourselves as “doing a Bible translation.” Rather, we see ourselves as “providing translation services,” such as the roles mentioned above to the translation teams of native speakers, who are the ones actually doing the translation.
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Other benefits of technology in Bible translation work
In many cases, technology allows the translation process to be more centralized, since data can be sent over the internet. In Ethiopia, translation teams will generally work on their translation draft in their home area, sending and receiving Paratext data to their teammates or consultants based in the Addis Ababa central office, and occasionally come to that office for a couple of weeks to do an in-person consultant check with one of our staff when they have finished drafting a book of the Bible, or to record an audio Scripture reading of a set of books, for example. These days, very few SIL Ethiopia mission staff permanently live in the remote language area. However, geography plays an important role in how work is modeled; in countries like Papua New Guinea, where the mountainous terrain makes many language groups extremely isolated, centralization is not possible in the same way, and there you tend to find the more traditional model of an on-site linguist-translator missionary still used. (However, even there, many support functions of the translation process can be provided from a centralized hub.)
Thanks to technology, we can distribute the Bible in more formats than just a print book. We can (and do) record audio Scriptures, dub promotional videos like The Jesus Film, and develop Bible apps that allow the material to be accessed on a person’s smartphone. Some might think these other formats diminish the need for the more involved process of translating a print Bible, but this is not true! We have found that providing access to audio or digital Scriptures increases the community’s interest in getting their own print Bible, and these other formats serve as a form of advertisement for the final result.
Related: Through new audio Bible app, God speaks in the native languages of India
What about AI?
A newer issue for Bible translation and technology is AI (artificial intelligence). I can say with some confidence that I don’t think AI would ever be able to simply do a Bible translation for us. This is because a foundational principle of AI is that the quality of its output is based on the quality and quantity of its input. Modern AI programs can perform impressive feats of English writing at the click of a button because they have a huge amount of professional English writing input to train them how to write. But for languages with less input data, the ability to teach AI how to provide good output drastically decreases. The number of hilariously poor English auto-translations of my Ethiopian friends’ Amharic social media posts tells me that computer-assisted translation has a long way to go for smaller languages. (And Amharic, an official language of Ethiopia spoken by tens of millions of people, is by no means a “small” language!) For the minority languages that we work with in Ethiopia, there’s next to nothing available online that can be used to train AI for written output.
This does not, however, mean that AI is useless in the translation world. SIL is currently piloting the modified use of AI in several translation projects. While AI cannot and probably will not be able to produce a polished, grammatically correct and natural-sounding translation on its own, due to the input limitations mentioned above, it can certainly assist with the process. The AI pilot projects I’ve heard about are Old Testament translation projects, and preliminary results show that an AI-generated Old Testament draft, based on the input data of an already-published New Testament, serves as a helpful starting point for the team to work from and edit, and is much faster than starting to draft the Old Testament translation from scratch. But I will reiterate the principle of output being based on input. If the New Testament has mistranslations, misspellings, sentence construction that doesn’t sound natural, or inconsistent punctuation, then the Old Testament output will contain those same errors. Careful work to ensure a high-quality product has always been foundational to Wycliffe’s philosophy of Bible translation, and the modern era of AI only highlights this necessity.
David Ford
David Ford works with Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL Ethiopia to help lay the groundwork of both translation and education in native languages. Specifically, David provides support roles of librarian, archivist, and typesetter for SIL Ethiopia.
