On the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, AImen!

Nice catch; you’ve an AI for detail.

Well, good news is, you may soon be able to read the Bible like the way you want to, thanks to artificial intelligence and computer sciences.

A fortnight ago, a group of computer scientists and mathematicians from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and Indiana University in the US developed an algorithm that identifies different authors’ writing styles by studying various versions of the Bible. Their research is published in the latest edition of the journal Royal Society Open Science . For starters, hundreds of versions of the Holy Book exist across the globe and most are ‘written’ or ‘edited’ by different sets of translators and writers. Now, scientists believe, with the help of the algorithm that scanned various editions of the Bible (they used 34 English language versions of the New and Old Testaments), we can convert written works into different styles for different audiences.

You may say so. Who’d have thought the Bible, of all literary resources, would help us improve computer translations.

It is a pivotal moment in the history of not only the Bible but also in the evolution of translation studies and computer sciences. Having an algorithm that can figure out and reproduce different writing styles is a big leap for publishing so much so that it helps us alter the writing style of a book (say the Bible) and make it suitable to a writing style the reader is familiar with.

Quite possible. I hope the Golgotha scenes would stay the way they were. Jokes apart, the scientists say their long-term goal is to change the Bible’s style for its audience, which is not a new approach if you have studied the history of Bible translations. For instance, The Old Testament was written originally in Hebrew and Aramaic. The New Testament had Greek. Most versions of the Bible mirror the language patterns and constructions of the periods in which they were translated.

If you look at the King James Version or KJV, which came out in 1611, a period when William Shakespeare was active, you could see the version is written in the poetic Shakespeare-like language (“For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish- Psalm 1-6.) In his brilliant book, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible , author Adam Nicolson has discussed at length the laborious efforts that went into the making of the KJV in particular and the Bible in general.

Indeed. Experts say the Bible is the most annotated and indexed literary text in human history. It has 31,000 verses and this ocean of literature in many versions have helped the computer scientists build 1.5 million unique combinations of words. This was the best data they could get to train the system.

Now, how this experiment is going to pay rich dividends is when computer science furthers the work on style translation algorithms, which has proven to be a Herculean task considering the varieties existing in languages. Understanding individual styles of writing and maintaining that in the translation has always been a mammoth challenge before translations. Now thanks to “style translation algorithms” like the one developed using the Bible, computers can better understand one author’s style and convert them into another’s style without losing the meaning.

Well, that’s ambitious. But we’re getting there, thank God!

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