AI: The program that translates the Bible into rare languages ​​- 08/29/2023 – Science

Probably no book in the world has been translated as much as the Bible. But even so, Christian organizations consider that the number of languages ​​with access to the holy book is still low.

According to the Wycliffe Global Alliance, which conducts annual surveys of access to the Bible on the planet, out of a total of 7,388 languages ​​in the world, 724 have the entire Bible translated, and 1,617 have only the New Testament. The data is from 2022.

Aiming at this gap, two researchers in the field of Engineering and Computer Science —and who are Christians— have teamed up to build artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can facilitate Bible translation.

These tools are encompassed by the Greek Room project, founded by researchers Ulf Hermjakob and Joel Mathew, from the Institute of Information Sciences at the University of Southern California (USC), in the USA.

The project targets languages ​​that receive little investment —for example, have no or few dictionaries, grammars and studies about them.

Hermjakob is German and Evangelical Lutheran; Mathew is Indian and grew up attending an evangelical Pentecostal church in his country — including accompanying his parents’ efforts to translate the Bible into native languages ​​spoken in India, an activity in which the family was engaged.

Hermjakob and Mathew met at university — and recognized each other in faith.

They consider Greek Room to be in the pilot phase, being collaboratively experimented with by translation agencies around the world.

“Right now, we are providing [as ferramentas de IA] to about seven, eight languages, most of them Asian. But we want to reach a scale of 70 to 80 languages ​​next year,” Hermjakob, a senior researcher at USC, told BBC News Brasil.

“Before, we spent a year developing the Greek Room. I would say that it is in the pilot stage, but it is already in use and is being considered useful”, celebrates the researcher, dedicated to natural language processing and machine learning for years.

He declined to share which languages ​​the Greek Room is already using because “in some places, Christians, including Bible translators, are persecuted by governments and militant groups.”

The project brings tools such as spell checker, tracking characters and words that have signs of error, highlighting words and passages that seem to be missing and presenting word suggestions. The idea is for it to be integrated with other existing translation programs.

The creators of the Greek Room receive research funding from an agency that is part of the international organization Every Tribe Every Nation (Eten) —which works with goals to boost, by 2033, access to Bibles for all populations.

The development of the AI ​​tools is in charge of Hermjakob and Mathew, but they have collaborators who make tests and suggestions around the world.

Joel Mathew says that the Greek Room’s principle is to be as open as possible — starting with being free.

“We’ve also explicitly stated that we’re going to make our tools open-licensed and put all code [de programação] on GitHub, which is a popular portal as an open source code repository,” says Mathew, Master of Computer Science from USC.

Role of translation professionals in the face of AI

The pair of researchers is developing the tools thinking mainly of agencies and people from the Christian community with experience in translation.

They are people who have a good command of a language that works as a “gateway” and who will translate the Bible from it into a minor language.

For example, Hindi would be a “gateway” for a Bible to be translated into a minor language in India.

Many of these languages ​​likely to receive Bible translations have few written or recorded records, so it is hoped that the Greek Room will also help in preserving these.

Meanwhile, the creators of Greek Room guarantee that the tool won’t take away the work of professional translators, because it doesn’t translate a text from scratch.

“Our hope is to help them, not replace them in any way,” says Mathew.

He points out that there are two main stages in the huge work of Bible translation: the draft and the quality check.

“There’s a lot more effort going into checking the quality of what’s been drafted. So we’re supporting this step, because we believe that’s where there can be the most benefit for Bible translators, if time slows down and it makes their work easier. “, says the Indian researcher.

Bruno Murtinho, president of the Brazilian Association of Translators and Interpreters (Abrates), believes that tools like this are here to stay —and adds that professionals are already using programs based on artificial intelligence to help with their work, such as MemoQ and Trados.

“All tools can be useful… If a tool is good or bad, it all depends on how it will be used. It’s no use for us to say we won’t use it, and the whole world will run over us with the use of Intelligence Artificial”, says the translator, interpreter and subtitler.

“The work of translation is not just about taking a word and transforming it into that word [em outra língua]consists of you understanding the whole context, understanding the idea, being able to convey that idea, looking for the best expression, the best term to convey what was said in the other language.”

“Even more so in the specific case of the Bible. It is full of metaphors, full of questions that have reference at the time. Religious texts are abstract, philosophical. Their interpretation has to be very careful”, he points out.

Murtinho also points out that, in the case of the Greek Room, the focus is on minority languages, for which there are not many references – which demands even more of the work of the human professional.

missionary work

Murtinho recalls that the history of translation and religions is ancient. Saint Jerome, considered the patron saint of translators, was a theologian and priest who, between the 4th and 5th centuries, translated biblical texts from Greek and Hebrew into Latin.

This joint history also goes through missionary work over the last few centuries, such as the Catholic and Evangelical missions embedded in the history of Brazil —and in the trajectory of domination of indigenous peoples.

“Language-trained pastors were sent to different countries to spend ten or 20 years learning the local language, then do a translation. Nowadays, the model is a little different. So we often look for Christian communities that already exist, but they don’t have the Bible available in their language”, explains Ulf Hermjakob.

Mathew recognizes that while the Greek Room has more technical goals, at the back of it is the project’s goal to expand the Christian faith.

“The tool itself doesn’t say that, but it’s definitely in our hearts as Christians to share the gospel so that more people know Jesus. However, the tool is focused on one task, and that is specifically Bible translation,” says the researcher.

Regarding the hypothesis of the AI ​​tool being used to translate other non-Christian religious texts, such as the Koran (the holy book of Islam), Mathew also points out that this is not the focus, but does not completely refute this possibility.

“Our tools can certainly be used for other types of texts. The technology is independent, but with our project, we’re really looking to support primarily the translation of the Bible and perhaps other Christian texts.”

The text was originally published here.