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We had a fella from Wyclyffe Bible Translators come out and give a demo of what technology is being used in the missionary field. One of his exhibits was a red plastic bag -- looked somthing like a WalMart bag, that had the entire book of John printed on it. Missionaries are filling these bags w/ helium and sending them into Korea and other places.

"..for translating the bible from latin.."

In fact, the original text of the Bible was not written in Latin. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, which was the language of the common people during that period and place in time.

The Dark Ages were a very bad thing.. but it was the antithesis of the spirit in which the original text was created, and a huge perversion of the teachings of the New Testament.

Because of the large volume of required input language into the system, I don't think that this system will be good for translating Bibles into new languages (think Wycliffe USA).

The advantage of this system, as it would pertain towards helping a particular religious community, is to make it easier to translate the large amount of books on religion into other languages more accurately.

The Czech schoolboys who worked so hard to make a Czech translation of the Harry Potter books would no longer have to wait so long for translations. Rather, the book could be fed through the statistical system and in under a day (minus proofreading) there could be a very nice translation into any mainstream language you wanted.

The advantage here would not be in translating Bibles into new languages, but rather translating massive amounts of books on the subject of Christianity to various languages.

Perhaps this technology would even have a use with Amazon's online digital book project in allowing all of the books on their site to be effeciently translated into other languages and marketed digitally. Interesting concept, to have all of the resources of Amazon.com in digital format for any mainstream language. That could do amazing things for the cross-country circle of ideas and thoughts.

Just my 3.14159 cents...

Respectfully,
clint :)

The really intriging part of working with Wycliffe is getting to see and know people who are truly remote from Western Civilization. It really sounds like one of the most unforgetable experiences imaginable.

This would be a sideshow for them, but they might have some interest in making their work accessible, as long as it didn't take resources away from their primary task of translating the bible into every language in the world. In the process, of course, they have to give every language a written form, and a dictionary. The side effect is that they are preserving records of many languages which would otherwise be lost.

If you are a Christian, you might want to look at Wycliffe Bible Translators.

I spent a summer in Papua New Guinea doing volunteer computer work with Wycliffe Bible Translators. They need network admin, office support stuff to help them with logistics. They also develop software to aid in translation.

I met a guy who left Silicon Valley and now spends a lot of his time in a small village in PNG with a Solar powered laptop working on an XML based software development project. Nice in quiet -- No roads, electricity, plumbing, etc. To distract you.

While his wife helped out the local schools, John worked building software to assist in making translations between related languages. The project was fairly cutting edge both from a technology and linguistic perspective. (yes much better than bablefish).

While their main goal is Bible translation, the educational work and small things like giving tribal groups an alphabet and written language, Do a ton to build the infrastructure of third world countries.

The Organization is also 100% volunteer, even up to the Director -- so know one is using it to make a buck!!
See http://www.wycliffe.org/volunteer/needs.htm#opp7 for their current volenteer requests

Wycliffe Bible Translaters is always in need of more computers, and they take donations.

No, this isn't a troll and it's not offtopic. It's not meant to spark a religious debate. I posted it so people of this persuasion would know about it. Thanks.

And the Bible has been changing and changing for a very long time now. After taking a Classics course (god what a waste of time) you can see just how things like old texts change. The KJ bible is close, but noone can say that it is a truly perfect translation of the original texts.

The king james version of the bible was written at the behest and under the scrutiny of king james, a corrupt old ~16th century monarch. It was translated from the septuagint, IIRC, a latin translation of older (no originals remain) texts. While usable, it is far the inferior of most modern english translations in terms of accuracy. (NRSV is best for truth to actual translations, while NIV is pretty good for capturing the spirit of the original text, or so I've been told.)

Modern translations tend to be closer to the oldest and most reliable manuscripts than the KJV, the opposite of what you suggest. Unlike the KJV, newer translations are typically translated from the oldest and most accurate manuscipts, not from the last version of the bible some guy made 5 months ago. There are other reasons for increased accuracy -- there are simply more manuscripts, (the dead sea scrolls, for example) there is greater (free beer) access to them -- you just have the files on your computer -- and we don't believe that the (already once-translated) latin is for some reason more accurate than the older greek and hebrew.

Translations are more accurate because of other reasons, like we don't believe that women are evil or should be suppressed any more, and translators these days (www.wycliffe.org, although I don't see much meat on their site) tend to have hardcore computational linguistics tools that really weren't available 500 years ago.