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Bible Translation and AI

There is a value in speeding up Bible translation, but not at the cost of losing the human and community touch.

Back in 1988 when we first went to Africa, we were the proud owners of one of the early Toshiba laptops. It had two floppy disc drives and very primitive monochrome graphic display. We had to learn to jump through all sorts of hoops to get it to display and print the special characters that we needed in order to work with the Kouya language. I remember one colleague plaintively saying that it takes an awfully long time to do things quickly with a computer!

Of course, computers have improved massively since those days and the phone in my pocket is now infinitely more powerful than that early laptop.

One thing that has not changed in that time, is the quest to use computers to make Bible translation quicker and more accurate. Even back in those early days, we had some impressive tools to help us work with languages that used non-standard scripts. Over time, we saw the development of revolutionary databases to handle language analysis, tools to help ensure that translation was consistent and all sorts of other good things. Bible translation was a computer-geek’s dream come true!

There was another, more profound strand of thought in the translation world, too; the idea of getting computers to actually do the translation itself. With a dual floppy laptop, this was obviously impossible, but as computers became more powerful and with the advent of the internet and cloud based computing this dream became possible. I commented on some early thinking about this fifteen years ago.

 One of the most important aspects of any translation project is the Godly lives of the translation team demonstrating the reality and relevance of the message long before the words emerge from the printer. As one African church leader put it, ‘we want to see the Holy Spirit in the lives of the translators long before we see the words Holy Spirit on the page’. There is a value in speeding up Bible translation, but not at the cost of losing the human and community touch. This is something we westerners with our task orientation find very hard to understand – but the value of  long term relationships trump the speed of Google in the Kingdom!

https://www.kouya.net/?p=2085

The advent of AI has given new life to this debate and I’d encourage anyone interested in Bible Translation or mission in general to give this paper by Jonathan Robin a read. He gives an excellent overview of how AI (or NLP – Natural Language Processing) is being used in Bible translation today. However, I am very encouraged to see that he comes to similar conclusions as I did over a decade ago:

… Bible translation is best done by human beings, using software as a tool. Producing a first draft is only about 10 percent of the work involved in creating a translation, whether that draft is produced by humans or NLP. Even if software could create a perfect translation—and it cannot—the process of translating the Bible into a local language creates a sense of ownership and community, bringing together the translation team and the group they serve, while also preparing that community to study and teach using the translation that is produced. If the group for whom a translation is intended does not feel connected to it, they may never use it.

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/artificial-intelligence-and-bible-translation/

This debate echoes across mission (and, indeed, across modern life), just because something can be done technologically, it doesn’t mean that it should be. Underlying all of these technological advances is a host of theological and missiological questions which must take precedence.

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