IT and Bible translation

An article I wrote on IT and Bible Translation has been published on the Kingdom Code blog. Andy Geers approached me a while back and asked me to write it. I'm just waiting for a flood of email to my inbox now.

You want a Bible text API? I've got three!

I've just finished putting a little Bible text widget onto our Jesus in my Language page. It cycles through various Bible texts. It runs through the languages in reverse order because the interesting scripts are all at the end of the list.

It uses the Digital Bible Platform API, which is not to be confused with the Digital Bible Library API. There's also the Bible Search API. All of them require you to register to get an API key. I can't easily tell how many Bible versions are available in all of them but I think they all have hundreds. Wycliffe USA is one of the partners behind the Digital Bible Library, which is one of the the ones that I didn't use.

I have previously blogged my persoanl thoughts on Bible text and copyright.

Bible App Builder

I was introduced to this by the guy who is behind Bible Resources: how to find and how to share them. It's an application that allows you to build an Android Bible app, containing a single language. There's a good writeup of it here: Going Mobile with Translated Scripture. I tried it myself with some public domain English Bible text and it worked really well. As I've done Blackberry development I tried to see if the Blackberry porting tool could repackage it for the BB10 platform, and it could.

Update: The software has now been released: Scripture App Builder.
Update 2: A church in Northern Ireland has been helping synch the audio and the text without knowing the language! Apportunity knocks

I've been working on the Youversion Bible app

I can now decloak and reveal that the work I've been doing on BB10 was on the Blackberry version of the Youversion Bible app for the BB10 platform as recently announced by Youversion. My part has only been small, as I've only done it in some of my lunchbreaks. Another developer has done most of the work.

Update: Oct 28, 2013 it's now released http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/1222/?countrycode=GB&lang=en

The Youversion people are really committed to cross platform apps. Look at the list of platforms on their app page. Not many people can say their app works on HP/Palm or Symbian!

Bible translation and copyright

Disclosure - I work for Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK and we second people to other organisations to work on Bible Translation. I don't do translation, but I work in IT. I don't speak for Wycliffe Bible Translators UK.

I've had a draft post on copyright and the Bible sat around for ages, and today I came across this post by Michael Johnson, Bible Copyright vs. the Church, which describes many of the issues, and does it a whole lot better than I could. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, but I do with most of it. So I suggest you read it.

I won't discuss the issue of making money, but there is also an issue about quality of translation. If a group of people put a lot of effort into a translation and then relinquish copyright and make it available digitally then someone else could take their translation, change the bits they don't like and republish it under the same name of the original translation. They may produce a "worse" translation, but someone's standards. Then there are two versions of this Bible. If the worse translation gets a lot of coverage people may blame the original group of translators for producing a bad translation, whereas they've done nothing wrong. 
Creative Commons may give ways of making the Bible available, whilst making sure it doesn't get changed, so those who actually publish copyright bibles could consider this.

What got me started on the original article was this post on Google+, which I post without comment. 

Update: There is the Every Tribe Every Nation project which is working to get Bible texts distributed in digital form. So those who own the copyright aren't necessarily holding onto the texts but are releasing them for use. It involves Wycliffe, Biblica and the American Bible Society. Youversion are one of the consumers of the texts.

Interesting Bible Translation and tech snippets

I was talking to someone this week who is working on various technical things that help Bible Translation. One is LanguageForge, which is like SourceForge, but for data on languages. So it could be used for translation projects when it's released.

Another is Graphite - "a free and open rendering engine for complex scripts". It's really useful when it comes to working on minority languages, may of which have complex scripts. It's now available in Firefox 11, LibreOffice 3.4+, Fieldworks and other software. So with support for translation tools, typesetting and web browsers you have end to end support for these scripts. Mobile devices are in their sights too...

Tim Berners-Lee and an anecdote involving Bible Translation

In 2008 Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation. In the speech where he announced it he told an interesting anecdote:

This person, this man had taught himself English by using various books that he’d come across. Among them are the bible I understand, something that he could get in both languages. Having taught himself English and having got some sort of rudimentary Internet connection, then he could sell his services as a translator on the open market out there in the big wide world. He could not only – so he could bring money into the village but also he could be a channel to bring information into the village. He could translate the stuff that was out there into the village. And he could operate – so he could enable commerce.

The reason he told it was because he was talking about access to the internet could enable development goals. Naturally, given my job, the thing that interested me was the fact that having the Bible in English and presumably his own language, was what enabled him to sell his translation services.

(I first heard about this anecdote on the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast.)

Comprehensive site on fonts, scripts and writing systems

One of the organisations that I follow the work of is the Non Roman Scripts Initiative (NRSI) of SIL. Getting Bibles into all the languages of the world that need them often means getting the Bible into all the writing systems of those languages, and the people at NRSI do a lot of work on getting complex scripts to work on modern technology.

They've recently launched their ScriptSource website. There's actually been something there for a few years, but only a few pages. However I can now see why it took so long to launch it properly - there's so much there - 181 scripts, nearly 7000 languages, 100,000 Unicode symbols (including the snowman). It's not just a site for information though, they invite contributions and advertise software needs.

I'm impressed.

A picture of a radio programme in the making

I don't often point to other blogs, because you might as well just read them, but this one was worth highlighting. David Ker has put a photo on one of his blogs showing him at work producing a radio programme with Bible material. Click on the picture to see what the numbers in the stars mean.

Wycliffe Staff Conference

We had our annual staff conference at the end of last week. The main part of the conference consists of reports from selected people on what they've been doing. As it happened I'd heard most of the people before for various reasons, but they all said some new stuff.

Afterwards we had discussion groups. One of the things that our group mused on was the fact that the speakers were saying how they were using ways of getting Bibles to people in non-print form (e.g. recordings and mobiles), because literacy rates aren't high. We commented how we are in what you could call a "post-literate" society, where people don't read much and so the same methods would be useful in getting the Bible into the hands of those who don't "consume" print media. The difference though, is that those in the UK who choose not to read have the opportunity, whereas those in countries where literacy isn't high don't have the opportunity.

So what does Wycliffe actually do?

I've been thinking about how to present what Wycliffe UK (aka Wycliffe Bible Translators UK) does to the world. As I'm not a marketing/PR/communications person you're not going to get a polished answer, but my thought processes. One of the reasons for thinking about this is because of the recent change ("Vince's change") that Google introduced recently in the way they work out what to give you when you search. It's a problem because we aren't as high in the search results for things like "bible translation uk" as we used to be

The thing is, although our aim is to translate the Bible into every language that needs a translation (with partners, to start by 2025), in practise not a lot of our people are actually doing translation. The best people to translate a language are those that have it as their mother tongue, and we can help the process. So when we're recruiting we need a lot of other skills other than just being good at learning a language and then translating.

As well as the Google problem the other thing that got me thinking was our weekly "Centre fellowship" at which we heard from people who work on what we call "Scripture Use" worldwide. One of the reasons we do more than translation is that our aim is transformed lives, and a translated Bible can't change anyone if they can't read it (so we do literacy work). Other materials also help people with the Bible, like Bible reading notes, songs etc. Developing this material is part of Scripture Use.

One of the things we heard yesterday was the very practical work of help people who have undergone traumatic events to apply the Bible to their situation, which we call Trauma Healing.

So bringing these things together, our problem (fortunately not just my problem) is that a) we want people who think we just do translation to realise that it's part of a bigger picture and
b) we want to present that bigger picture in such a way that when people look for "Bible Translation" in Google, they still find us!

Publishing the Bible online

Another snippet from the Check IT Out day we held last Saturday:

You might think that Wycliffe would already be putting the Bibles it translates online. However there are reasons why that is trickier than you might think. One of these is the issue of ownership. I don't know all the ins and outs of this, let alone explain them, but its roughly to do with the fact that the translated Bible isn't owned by us, but by the organisations we work in partnership with.

There are also technical challenges with the original text. It may be in some old desktop publishing format. Even if we have the text, we may have incomplete information about the fonts used. Only recent work is in Unicode. Some translations aren't electronic at all (yet).

Then there's the presentation side, you can't just put a load of ascii text on a web page, it needs to be presented in a useful way. Actually none of this was said on Saturday, I'm just setting this scene! The presentation was about a project which is overcoming these hurdles.

One of the big things in getting the Bible into peoples' hands is the mobile phone. There are more mobiles than PCs and an increasing number can handle text, audio and video. So a lot of the presentation was what's happening around the world with mobiles. One thing I hadn't heard of is the company O3B Networks. O3B is Other 3 Billion. They are putting up a new network of satellites to offer cheaper and faster satellite internet connection. The same connection can also be used for mobile traffic.

The project's in private beta at the moment, so you can't see it yet.

Bible Translation mentioned in the Westminster Confession

I took part in the Check IT Out day we held last Saturday. I'll blog about some other things on it later, but I thought I'd just share this thought from one of the other speakers.

The Westminster Confession from 1646 mentions the need for Bible Translation in Chapter 1 (emphasis mine):

VIII. The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentic; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal to them. But because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God who have right to, and interest in, the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the language of every people to which they come, that the Word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner, and, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, may have hope.

Text from carm.org

I don't suppose many church leaders, or leadership groups get together and say "In planning the next year or so, shall we have a quick look at the Westminster Confession to see if there's anything that we should be concentrating on, but which we've forgotten about?". If they did though, well...

Predictive text and mother tongue

There's a very interesting article in the Wall Street journal, How the Lowly Text Message May Save Languages That Could Otherwise Fade. 

Can a language stay relevant if it isn't used to send text messages on a cellphone?

Language advocates worry that the answer is no, and they are pushing to make more written languages available on cellphones.

Here's a quote from the end of the article:

Michael Wehrs, Nuance's vice president of industry affairs, says allowing texting in native languages makes it easier for people who don't speak English to conduct business. "The population needs to be able to use the device," he says. "To require them to use English is futile."

Hmmm, the same is true of the Bible. If you substitute "conduct business" with "understand the Bible" and "English" for a language that people understand, but isn't their mother tongue, then the sentence is still true.

Portable audio Bible players

I've written about the megavoice before. Rob Baker has a round up of three portable audio Bible players. I saw the Saber a couple of days ago. It's very chunky. It's great to see some good solutions for getting the Bible as spoken word out away from main electricity.

Megavoice - solar powered Bible

I've written about the Megavoice before, and I had a look at one today.

It's made out of quite robust plastic, with the solar panels in the back. The controls are pretty straightforward - on/off, pause, and then three pairs of skip forward and back buttons. They are three different sizes and the bigger ones skip further (to the next chapter, say). It's a very useful way of getting the Bible in people's hands.

Bible Translation is bigger than you think

A good post on what's involved in Bible translation from a new blog by Dave G.

Just in case you think Bible Translation is a back-room activity for the seriously academic, here is a blog from a Bible-translation type who thinks otherwise.

"Jesus in my language" launches

A new part of one of our websites has launched - Jesus in my language. It has a selection of verses from Mark's gospel in various languages. I've had a small involvement in this at the start, sorting out some of the Unicode issues.

Although Unicode is the way forward when it comes to working in the languages of the world, a lot of the stuff in the archives isn't in Unicode, as it was worked on before Unicode was available, or the appropriate tools were available in Unicode. Instead custom fonts were created. Sometimes the archives contained these fonts, and sometimes they didn't so that was more of a challenge. Ventura Publisher was the favoured tool for typesetting the Bible in those days, and so sometimes the clues as to what the characters are is in Ventura format files.

In precomputer days sometimes custom fonts were obtained by filing off parts of some of the letters to get the character required!

Perl programmer wanted

I'm working on a project which is a website contain material for those translating the Old Testament. We are looking for a volunteer (i.e. you don't get any money for it) to help us out next year (2008).

We would like someone who has Perl experience. The sort of time commitment we would like is a week a month, say, from January, for up to a year. Alternatively a three month block of time, if someone were between jobs for example, would be great.

You can contact me at Paul underscore Morriss at wycliffe dot org.

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