AI Technology Pioneers Bible Translation with ‘Greek Room’ Project

In a groundbreaking step for Bible translation, researchers from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the translation of the Bible into the world’s lesser-known languages.

This ambitious initiative, dubbed the “Greek Room” project, is led by senior research scientist Ulf Hermjakob and research engineer Joel Mathew.

The Greek Room project aims to overcome longstanding challenges in Bible translation, particularly for low-resource languages lacking written versions of the Scriptures. While about 700 of the world’s 7,100 languages have a complete Bible translation, the vast majority—over 6,000—still do not. Additionally, many languages have only partial translations, highlighting the immense scope of the work still required.

“People don’t realise there are about 7,100 languages in the world,” said Hermjakob. “Google Translate covers about 100 of them. Our focus for this Bible translation is on very low-resource languages that don’t even fall within the top 500.”

For Mathew, whose family background involves Bible translation efforts in India, the project is deeply personal. He believes that AI can significantly enhance and expedite the translation process. “There were a lot of areas where I felt software technology could really speed up, improve, support, and help them,” he noted. “It’s one of my passions to see the Bible translated into all languages.”

The Greek Room project is designed to speed up and improve the Bible translation process by employing AI to tackle straightforward, objective tasks while allowing human translators to focus on nuanced cultural contexts and complex linguistic challenges. The technology developed in the project is intended to address unique translation problems, such as conveying concepts that do not exist in certain cultures.

Mathew highlighted one such challenge. “There is a community living in the mountains, and they live in huts without doors, so there’s no concept of a door in their culture. In the Bible, there is a verse that says, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ The question is, how do you translate that for people so that it is meaningful to them?”

To tackle such complexities, the Greek Room enables translators to adapt these messages in culturally appropriate ways. “We try to explain it not specifically as knocking at the door, but instead describe a scene where someone is standing at the entrance of your house and asking to be invited in,” Mathew explained.

The project’s mission goes beyond providing technological tools; Hermjakob and Mathew are committed to sharing their work with other translation efforts worldwide. They envision the Greek Room as an open-source platform accessible to anyone engaged in translating the Bible, ensuring that their tools, data, and code can help others make further progress.

“We want to make it so that other Bible translation efforts can use what we have built,” said Hermjakob. “One thing we decided early on is that we want to make our data and code public.”

By blending cutting-edge AI with the cultural insight of human translators, the Greek Room represents a significant leap forward in Bible translation. Hermjakob and Mathew’s pioneering work promises that more communities around the world, especially those whose languages are still underrepresented, will soon gain access to the Scriptures in their native tongues.

(Source: Insights)