** Can AI Translate the Bible? ————————————————————
Yes… and no.
It’s no surprise that people are experimenting with AI in Bible translation. There’s a lot of discussion in the field about how, when, and whether it should be used at all. Personally (this is Benjamin writing), I think some of the experiments are pretty fascinating—like giving AI the New Testament and everything we know about a language, then asking it to generate a first draft of the Old Testament. Not everyone agrees with that approach, but in some language groups, people have even preferred the AI’s draft over the team’s original one!
While I don’t use AI to translate Scripture directly, I do use it to help our team create resources faster. Finding ways to use the computer to work more efficiently is something I’ve enjoyed for years. It’s just recently gotten much more powerful.
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** Using AI to Support Bible Translators ————————————————————
Training trips have been scarce this year, so I’ve been focusing on the other aspect of my work. As you may know, our team develops resources for Bible translators. We focus on identifying linguistic challenges and offering strategies to help translators address them. A lot of that work requires thoughtful human insight, but there’s also a fair bit of tedium—and that’s where AI really shines. Not everyone wants to learn how to work with AI though, and there’s no need for each team member to reinvent the wheel.
So I created a spreadsheet tool: humans input the stuff only humans can do, then we send it off to AI to finish the job. (We still do two rounds of review afterward, but it goes much faster now.) This has dramatically increased our output—vital now that most of what we have left is huge Old Testament books, and the groups we work with are clamoring for things to be finished. I was asked to share about what we’ve been doing at a conference this spring which people engaged with really well and made some connections to help further what we can do on this front.
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** Proofreading Help That Works ————————————————————
I also built a custom proofreading prompt for one of our resources—something that runs before our human proofreaders get to it.
When asked whether we should keep using it our top proofreader said:
“YES, great approach for the future, PLEASE! Saved lots of time and lots of aggravation. Thank you for providing it.”
She said that proofreading Joshua with AI’s help took her about 10% of the time it took to do Leviticus without it. That’s huge!
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** Training Materials ————————————————————
Recently, our training team asked me to work on AI analysis and suggested edits to our training resources to make sure that the language level was appropriate for those with English as a second language and incorporate a few new things. It went so well that I got a public shout-out in our “brag on your teammates” session on Monday! Now that project is expanding rapidly which is exciting (and a little daunting). But I’m hopeful we can keep shaping AI into the tool we need it to be.
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** So, can AI do Bible translation? ————————————————————
It can help—sometimes significantly! And the more we learn how to guide it well, the more useful it becomes. We’ve been able to get the translation resources for Joshua, Leviticus, and 1 Samuel done recently and hopefully the pace at which we can get these into the hands of people working to bring the Word to their communities will only keep increasing.
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