Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – The Impact of Technology on Bible Translation

By Reinier de Blois
October / November 2009

Bible translation has always been painstaking, laborious work. It is not just the difficulty of the work itself; there are also the technical challenges translators face. In the old days each draft had to be typed manually—four or five times!—before the project was completed. And once the text had received final approval, the entire manuscript had to be re-typed by the typesetter before it could be printed.

Changing Tools for Bible Translation
The revolution started around the mid-1980s, when more and more translation projects began making use of the personal computer. Thanks to the PC, a text had to be typed only once. After that, only the corrections needed to be entered and upon completion of the project, the text could be sent to the printer in digital format.

In the old days each Bible translation draft had to be typed manually—four or five times!—before the project was completed.

In those early days the software for typing and printing scripture files was designed almost exclusively by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International). SIL also produced tools enabling translators to type special characters, check punctuation and accents, and create word lists.

Creating word lists is not the kind of task anyone would have seriously dreamed of undertaking until the personal computer arrived, but it is precisely its time-consuming and laborious nature that makes it so suitable for an electronic brain. What it involves is extracting all the unique words from a text file and displaying them in alphabetical order, or sorting them by the frequency with which they occur. This allows Bible translators—or editors of any kind—to improve the text by easily identifying spelling mistakes or literal errors and and correcting them.

But it was in 1997 that United Bible Societies (UBS) made a special new computer tool available to Bible translators. Called Paratext, one of its many remarkable features was that it allowed the computer to display the Bible’s source texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek side-by-side on the computer screen. Furthermore, it offered dictionaries of the biblical languages; translations in languages from all over the world allowed users to draft their own translations and incorporated many other tools designed to improve the consistency of the text.

Since 1997, a number of other tools have seen the light. A research team at the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) spent many years developing software that would eventually facilitate comparisons of two versions of the same text in different languages, examining the internal structure of the words in both texts, and, on the basis of statistical analysis, determine which word in text A corresponds to which word in text B.

In addition, a tool was created that displays the source texts of the Bible in an interlinear format, together with the analysis of the structure of each word and its definition in English. This program allows users to perform relatively complex searches in the biblical texts. It also allows them to keep track of the way they have translated each word—thus enhancing the consistency of their translation. Finally, it provides links to other helpful digital resources such as the Logos Libronix Library.

Another extremely important tool now available is called Publishing Assistant. Developed by UBS with assistance from SIL, this program takes the completed translation produced in Paratext and converts it to the format required for the software used by typesetters in such a way as to speed up the typesetting process significantly.

Paratext 7.0
Paratext 7.0 was released in summer 2009, and at a workshop held just before the UBS Triennial Translation Workshop in Bangkok in June 2009 some forty staff from the four UBS areas were thoroughly familiarised with its new features so that they in turn can now train the Bible translators working in the field.

Dr. Reinier de Blois lives in Reeuwijk, The Netherlands, and works as a translation consultant for the United Bible Societies. He is the editor of the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew and a member of the software development team that created Paratext.