How AI Helps Translate the Bible at Lightning Speed
By Movieguide® Contributor
AI is helping Wycliffe Bible Translators make swift progress in getting the good news to people groups who haven’t yet read it in their native language.
“Our focus is how do we see God’s word come to these languages that have never had scripture in their own language and that is our heart passion and that’s what we’ve been about for these 80-plus years,” said John Chesnut, president of Wycliffe Translators.
“God’s using [AI] for his glory as well. So, we have a new tool that just has been out here for probably about a year or so that if a New Testament has been translated, they can use the material from the New Testament to load into the software and it will draft an Old Testament in just a few days,” Chesnut said of the AI tool.
Wycliffe’s translators also have a tool that creates written languages for groups that don’t have a written alphabet.
“Where there’s nothing written, no scripture yet at all, that will gather words from the community and then it uses that to teach the machine on how to draft translation too. So, that’s where there’s nothing started to help accelerate that as well,” Chesnut said.
Wycliffe Bible Translators has already translated 750 full Bibles and 1,700 New Testament Bibles. The group is continuing a goal it established in the ’90s: to have the Bible translated into every language by 2025.
The number of languages that are left to be translated is now less than 1,000.
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“As of today, it is about 888 remaining languages that are on our list anyway, so it’s been huge, huge progress since 1999,” said Chesnut. “The new thing that we’re seeing God do is that he literally is raising up his church around the world and taking on this effort.”
He continued, “They’re owning it now. They’re the ones that are doing it. And more and more, our role is coming alongside of these groups to say, ‘Can we help you accomplish what God has placed on your heart?’”
The advances in technology are helping spread the gospel quicker than ever.
“This is the first generation that can look and say, ‘This could happen during our lifetime.’ And I mean, it’s an incredible day to be part of what God’s doing around the world,” Chesnut said.
AI is helping the global church in other ways, too. Pastors and students of theology can use it to translate Greek and Hebrew or find sources for research, and it can auto-caption Christian resource videos.
One missionary in Tokyo finds AI’s translation services extremely helpful.
“That translation aspect can obviously be very difficult at times,” said pastor and missionary Leslie Taylor. “I do as much as I can by myself, but sometimes it helps with particularly complicated sentence structures,” he said of ChatGPT, “or I may ask it to explain a nuance, etc.”
“It’s still necessary to know Japanese because sometimes it gives mistaken translations — or just slightly off my meaning — so I need to discern,” he added. “But it is a helpful tool in the process to be sure.”
Another pastor, in Ohio, relies on ChatGPT to translate his sermons into Creole.
“We have a growing Haitian population in our area, and they are starting to attend church regularly,” Frasier explained. “We translate and hand out copies to families each week.”
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