Worthy Christian News > Christian > Researchers use AI for translating Bible into all languages with no written Scripture

Researchers use AI for translating Bible into all languages with no written Scripture

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Researchers in California have launched a ground-breaking initiative to use Artificial Intelligence technology to translate the Bible into thousands of languages that do not have a written version of the Scriptures, Relevant Magazine reports.

Titled the “Greek Room,” the AI Bible translation project is led by Ulf Hermjakob, a senior research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and Joel Mathew, an Indian national and research engineer at ISI, Relevant Magazine reports.

“People don’t realize that there are about 7,100 languages in the world,” Hermjakob told Relevant Magazine. “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.”

Explaining that he has a passion to see the Bible translated in all languages, Mathew told Relevant Magazine: “There were a lot of areas where I felt software technology could really speed up, improve, support and help them.”

Hermjakob and Mathew hope to offer the Greek Room as an open-source platform that is accessible to translators around the globe, Relevant Magazine reports. “We want to make it so that other Bible translation efforts can use what we have built in for their own research as well, so one thing we decided early on is that we want to make our data and code public,” Hermjakob said.