Researchers Use AI to Revolutionise Bible Translation with “Greek Room” Project

A team of researchers is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to transform Bible translation efforts through a pioneering project known as the “Greek Room.” Led by Ulf Hermjakob, a senior research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and Joel Mathew, a research engineer at ISI, the initiative aims to accelerate the translation of the Bible into languages that currently lack a written version of the Scriptures.

Historically, translating the Bible has been a painstaking process that can take over a decade to complete. Of the world’s 7,100 languages, only about 700 have a complete Bible, while more than 6,000 are still without a comprehensive translation. Although more than 3,500 languages have at least one book of the Bible, a large gap remains.

“People don’t realize 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.”

Mathew, whose parents were involved in Bible translation efforts in his native India, believes AI can dramatically enhance the process. “There were a lot of areas where I felt software technology could really speed up, improve, support, and help them,” Mathew explained. “It’s one of my passions to see the Bible translated into all languages.”

The Greek Room project is developing tools to make Bible translation more efficient, using AI to streamline the process. While some aspects of translation are straightforward, others require human input due to cultural nuances and the subjective nature of certain concepts. For instance, translating terms that have no direct equivalent in local languages poses a significant challenge.

Mathew offered an example: “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 address such difficulties, the Greek Room project enables translators to spend more time on these subjective elements, while AI handles more objective tasks. “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 added.

Driven by a shared passion for spreading the Bible, Hermjakob and Mathew hope to make the Greek Room an open-source platform that can be used by translators around the globe.

“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.”

The project represents a significant leap forward in Bible translation, offering hope that more languages will soon have access to the Scriptures through the power of AI.