## Adapting Digital Biblical Resources for Translation and Teaching: Harvesting low-hanging fruit and growing next generation resources

## Jonathan Robie biblicalhumanities.org jonathan.robie@biblicalhumanities.org

Abstract :    When  biblicalhumanities.org launched in 2013, we naively assumed that software developers would know how to take advantage of high quality, innovative data if it were published in open formats under free licenses. We understood the importance of building communities that know how to take advantage of this data, software and frameworks that make it easily accessible, and tailoring data to specific use cases, but we assumed that this would happen if we just made the  data  freely  available.  Freely  licensed  base  texts,  morphologies,  contextual  glosses,  syntax treebanks, discourse analyses, lexicons, textual variants, images, conjectural emendations, and grammars are available now, and some are at least as good as commercial resources, but they are not yet widely used.

In the last year or so, Jupyter Notebooks and academic conferences have started to bring this data into  academic  study,  but  we  have  barely  begun  to  tap  its  potential  for  translation,  language learning, and scripture engagement for those who know the languages.  To realize this potential, we need to understand the use cases and mindset of potential users and create software and other resources tailored to their needs.  Over time, we need to gather feedback from these same users, walk with them as they learn and grow, and welcome them into communities that will create the next generation of resources.

Linguists, translators, and language teachers often face the same questions, but they generally face them at different levels of abstraction, in different contexts, and in different sequences and time frames.  A linguist often needs to examine the entire corpus to identify all instances of a phenomenon. A language teacher needs ways to systematically teach the constructs of a language. A translator needs to understand what a particular word, phrase, clause, sentence, or passage means in order to render it into the target language.

In the last five years, a wide variety of freely licensed high-quality digital resources have been released for  biblical  languages,  including  base  texts,  morphologies,  contextual  glosses,  syntax  treebanks, discourse analyses, lexicons, textual variants, images, conjectural emendations, and grammars. Some of these are as good or better than the best commercial resources, others are not on the same level, and some  important  resources  have  no  freely  licensed  equivalent.  In  addition,  many  important  older resources  have  been  digitized,  including  excellent  technical  commentaries.  Some  of  this  data  was developed by Bible translation associations, including Greek syntax trees created by the Global Bible Initiative and discourse analysis done by SIL's Stephen Levinsohn. This data is beginning to be used in the research community, including multiple presentations at the Society for Biblical Literature and other academic conferences, and is being used to create materials for teaching biblical languages, but has not yet been adopted by the wider translation community.

These resources provide valuable information for translators and translation consultants who have some knowledge of biblical languages, but they need to be tailored to efficiently answer the kinds of questions they have as they work on a translation, when they have the questions, without forcing them to read through large amounts of abstract text in English or German, and provided in ways that work with the tooling, resources, and workflows that they use. And when our resources do not efficiently answer their questions,  we  need  to  provide  feedback  mechanisms  that  capture  their  questions  for  the  resource development community so that we can improve our resources and tooling.

## Focused

Bible translation is focused, prayerful work.  In the West, there is an increasing realization that our technologies and resources can distract us from the kind of attention we need to do focused work.1  What an individual translator needs to focus on can vary, but a translator who is looking at a circumstantial participle does not need to know all of the details of the aspect debate, a concrete answer is often better than an answer that requires mastering new abstractions, and a translator who needs a community that can help answer questions does not need to be distracted by a stream of notifications.

The goals of a translation determine the focus of the translator.  If a translator is translating from the original  languages  then  it  is  important  to  efficiently  describe  vocabulary,  syntax,  and  morphology, provide representative translations in languages the translator understands,  discuss idioms and other constructs that affect translation, and identify pitfalls that can lead to mistranslations.

For instance, consider a translator who is trying to translate this phrase from Matthew 1:20 'for that which is conceived in  her is from the Holy Spirit.'   If the translator is  working from a single hub language translation, this is probably straightforward.  If the translator is working from multiple hub language  translations,  all  conveniently  aligned  to  show  how  this  phrase  is  translated,  then  some translation  choices  become  evident,  but  the  reasons  for  these  choices  may  not  be  obvious  without additional background.

Now suppose we introduce a reverse interlinear to provide access to Greek.  Here is the same phrase as displayed in the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear in Logos:

This is much more complex than comparing English translations, and it is also more confusing than helpful - it provides information about each word, but little information about the relationships among words and phrases.  In this phrase, the Greek word order is quite different from that of the English translations, and nothing in the interlinear makes it obvious that 'Holy Spirit' is one constituent and 'what  has  been  conceived  in  her'  is  also  one  constituent.    This  display  contains  many  pieces  of information, but provides little help in bringing this information together to understand the structure of the sentence.

1 Newport, Cal. Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world . Hachette UK, 2016.

lere is the same phrase as displayed in the Cascadia Syntax Trees in Logos:

adv yào*

CL

S TÒ

CL*

S

v.part yevvn0Ev V*

vp*

TÒ

ràp

auTỹ

yEvvn9Èv

Here is the same phrase as displayed in the Cascadia Syntax Trees in Logos:

VC

<!-- image -->

The Cascadia display does identify the constituents, but only if the translator has learned to read the crossing lines in the display, and it also contains nodes that are of more interest to a parser than to a human being trying to read this text.

There  are,  of  course,  many  other  ways  that  the  syntax  of  this  phrase  can  be  visualized,  each  has advantages and disadvantages.2  Here is one way of displaying the structure of this sentence that makes the relationships among words and word groups clear with little additional overhead:

τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ Πνεύματός ἐστιν Ἁγίου·

Contextualized glosses can be used for an interlinear display of the same Greek phrase:

```
adv for s the adv in her v.part conceived p from Spirit Holy vc is
```

A good translation should maintain the relationship between the subject and predicate in  the above display.  What is from the Holy Spirit?  The subject answers that question: 'the in her conceived', which might  be  rendered  as  'that  which  is  conceived  in  her',  'what  is  conceived  in  her',  or  in  a  freer translation,  perhaps  'the  child  within  her'.    Where  is  this  child  from?    The  predicate  answers  that question: 'from the Holy Spirit'.

2 The blog post 'Nine Kinds of Ancient Greek Treebanks' discusses the relative advantages of nine different approaches. See http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/blog/2017/12/20/treebanks-for-ancient-greek/

пр*

VC ẺƠTLV

пр*

This syntactic display is much less busy than the interlinear display, but provides much more information about  the  basic  relationships  among  words  and  word  groups  in  the  phrase.    It  could  be  used  by  a translator with some knowledge of Greek to understand a difficult phrase, or by a translation consultant who wants to explain this structure to a translator with little or no knowledge of Greek.  If a phrase can be interpreted in more than one way, a display of each corresponding structure can illustrate the different interpretations much more efficiently than pages of text in theological English or German, and with much less distraction.  The translator does not need to understand the differences between cognitive linguistics, dependency grammars, and constituency grammars to grasp this structure, and there is no need to read the literature on hyperbaton to understand the basic meaning behind this particular word order well enough to translate accurately.3

Now let's return to the topic of focus.  A translator who is working from a single hub language translation will not face the questions that this representation answers.  For this passage, a translator working from several hub language translations may not face these questions either, though other passages might well raise questions that this representation answers.  But if a translator or a translation consultant is working from biblical languages or even referring to biblical languages, these kinds of questions will come up, and we need to find efficient ways to provide the answers without overly disrupting the prayerful focus needed for good translation work.  An interlinear provides a great deal of information about individual words, but very little information about the structure of the sentence as a whole, and this is particularly important for anyone who wants to understand the sentence. The representations we choose may display only a fraction of the information available in our linguistic representations. To keep translators focused on the data they actually need, we often may want to omit data that we would otherwise need for research or for creating optimal displays, but that are less relevant to translators.

The goal is to answer questions as they come up as simply as we can, but fully enough to understand and  translate  the  sentence  accurately.  We  want  to  provide  information  without  disrupting  the  focus needed to translate. To do this well, we need to understand what information translators need at their fingertips as they do their work.

## Concrete

'Every layer of abstraction loses 90% of the audience'.4  That means we should avoid introducing abstractions  that  are  not  needed  to  convey  what  needs  to  be  said,  especially  when  dealing  with  an audience that is not used to academic abstractions.

Academic Westerners  tend  to  imagine  that  translation  requires  advanced  education  and  mastery  of complex abstractions, and we may be alarmed to see translators with the equivalent of a high school or even junior high school education.5  In practice, mother tongue mastery of the target language is the most important qualification.  Anyone who works with refugees regularly sees high school and junior high school students who are quite adept at translating for their parents.  These children probably do not know the abstract terms used to describe languages in universities, but they understand the relevant languages and learn how to translate as needed. We see the same phenomenon for biblical languages. There are people who have mastered the vocabulary of linguistics, but are not particularly adept  at reading and understanding biblical languages. There are other people who have become adept at reading biblical languages, but have difficulty reading the metalanguage used to describe them. Some people are comfortable  in  both  the  language  and  the  metalanguage.    This  means  that  materials  created  for translators, translation consultants, and linguists may be significantly different even when conveying the same material - and even people who have similar roles may prefer different kinds of materials due to education levels, cultural factors, or personal preference.  We may need to produce different kinds of materials from the same base data.

3 This passage is an example of hyperbaton in which a phrase is interrupted by a word that is not part of the phrase.  Experts disagree on the significance of this kind of hyperbaton, and understanding the various possible explanations is not necessary for translating the phrase.

4 I originally learned this as 'Bosworth's Law' when Microsoft's Adam Bosworth used it in a presentation.  I do not know if it is original with him.

5 This is not meant to imply that all mother tongue translators have little formal education.  Some have a great deal of formal education.  We should avoid stereotypes while providing for the needs of a wide variety of translators.

## Maturing

Both translations and people mature over time.  The first translation into a new language may be done from a single hub language translation and a set of translator's notes with no knowledge of biblical languages, and the emphasis may be on producing a translation relatively quickly where no translation currently exists. This translation may be inferior to the translations available to English speakers, and it may be the only translation available for the language.  Ideally, this translation will be revised and improved over time, and perhaps more than one translation will eventually be produced (though this is sadly rare for most languages).

Similarly, a translator may mature as a translator, begin to understand why translations differ, learn biblical  languages,  and  eventually  become  a  qualified  translation  consultant.    We  need  to  raise  up Christians throughout the world so that Christians from all nations work together as equals.  For instance, we  might  introduce  biblical  languages  using  intensive  living  language  courses6,  or  perhaps  online learning7 or programmed materials8 could help make biblical languages more accessible.  We could explore establishing centers of excellence in biblical languages in various locations that are strategic for bible translation.  For translators new to working with biblical languages, we could produce translation resources and study materials that provide scaffolding for less experienced readers and online forums for translators to discuss their questions and learn from each other.9  We should envision growth paths that translators and communities can follow if they choose to, removing barriers when we can.

The resources we provide over time must also mature over time, as we learn what is most effective for our target audience.  To do that well, we need to capture the questions they have and learn about the strengths and shortcomings of our materials as they perceive them.

## Excellent

Our translations and the resources we provide to translators should both strive for excellence.  Even if the  first  translation  in  a  given  language  cannot  yet  be  described  as  excellent,  we  should  plan  for excellence over time.  This is equally true of the resources we develop for translators.

6   Paul  Nitz's Youtube channel shows how he teaches Greek in Malawi using a living language approach. Randall Buth and Christophe Ricco each teach biblical languages as living languages and produce useful materials for teachers.  Micheal Palmer and Jonathan Robie have been adapting these techniques for a textdriven approach that also draws from SIOP.

7   Such as BibleMesh Greek and Hebrew courses or Nicolai Winther-Nielsen's Moodle courses for Hebrew.

8   I have recently become aware of John Werner's 'Greek: a programmed primer', which may be useful for this purpose.

9 These same materials may be useful for biblical language learners all over the world.  Seminary education is not accessible to all, and Western seminaries and universities are generally reducing their offerings in biblical languages.

Open data resources are extremely important for providing access and removing barriers to research, but they are only useful if they are also good, which generally requires testing, curation, error reporting, and engagement with users over time.

At this point, the data for some freely licensed resources are at least as good as commercially available resources, including these:

-  MorphGNT morphology10
-  GBI11, Lowfat12, PROIEL13, Shebanq14, and Text Fabric15 syntax trees
-  Stephen Levinsohn's Greek New Testament Discourse Features16
-  Alan Bunning's textual variants17

These resources can be leveraged to provide useful new resources for translators - resources that are currently unavailable to most translators.

But many important existing resources are not openly licensed and the development of some important new resources are funded in ways that do not permit open licenses.  For instance, the Greek texts used for translation and the best hub language translations in most languages are not freely licensed, neither are the best translator's notes and lexicons. Translators must have access to the best resources available, and  the  Digital  Biblical  Library18  provides  authorized  and  licensed  access  to  these  resources  for translators worldwide. The goal of open data is not to restrict access to the best information, even if it is not freely licensed.  In the secular software world, open source has established itself by providing truly excellent solutions that can compete with commercial offerings, not by restricting access to commercial software, and the two are frequently used together in the same environments.  The same is likely to be true for  open source and open data in the translation world.

10 https://github.com/morphgnt/sblgnt

11 https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/greek-new-testament/tree/master/syntax-trees, in the sblgnt and nestle1904 subdirectories.

12 https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/greek-new-testament/tree/master/syntax-trees,  in  the  sblgnt-lowfat and nestle1904-lowfat subdirectories.

13 https://github.com/proiel

14 https://shebanq.ancient-data.org/

15 https://github.com/Dans-labs/text-fabric/wiki

16 https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/levinsohn

17 http://greekcntr.org

18 https://thedigitalbiblelibrary.org/about/

## Shared

The  software  and  data  that  we  share  is  an  important  part  of  our  community.    In  the  translation community, ParaTExt is not only the vehicle for sharing resources, it also shapes the way people work, manage their projects, measure consistency and quality using built-in tools, communicate, and publish their results. It provides a common frame of reference at the heart of a community.

The  open  resources  discussed  earlier  are  at  the  heart  of  another  community  that  provides  freely licensed  data  on  GitHub,  building  on  each  other's  work.    Until  recently,  people  in  this  small community either used queries or programs without GUIs or built their own, and it was difficult to become part of this community without significant knowledge of both programming and biblical languages.  Over the last year or so, the Eep Taalstra Center began using Jupyter Notebooks 19 to provide  this  kind  of  data  in  a  loosely  coupled  GUI  environment  that  can  be  used  with  less programming  background,  though  it  still  requires  programming  or  queries,  and  a  handful  of researchers  have  presented  results  of  this  approach  for  Hebrew  linguistics  at  several  academic conferences. A Jupyter Notebook is a document that can contain live code or queries and display results, and a module has also been written to support queries for syntax and morphology with biblical Greek. 20 This  kind  of  environment  is  particularly  well  suited  for  data  integration  using  various resources that may have been developed separately. The open data community uses a variety of tools, but we know each other, participate on each other's Slack channels, use each other's data, learn from each other, and see each other at conferences. This community is well-placed to create new resources and curate data over time, and we have tools that are useful for prototyping displays that might be used in software, but the tools we use are probably beyond the average non-programmer.

Using data from the open data community in translation tools will benefit both communities, but we should also consider sharing with a third community:  non-programmers who want to work in the original  languages  but  are  not  translators.    This  is  a  larger  community  than  the  first  two,  and  a community that the other two generally know and want to share with. We need a GUI-based tool that can provide the open resources we develop for translators to this wider community.  One possibility would be to have a free version of Scripture Online Tools that provides only free resources.  Another possibility would be to create a website. Either approach would benefit the majority world by giving free access to mature resources for understanding biblical languages, and it would benefit open data developers by providing a vehicle for sharing our work more easily with serious students of the Bible. And our communities overlap - the same person may be translator, a translation consultant, a pastor, a language teacher, or a scripture engagement expert, or several people may each play one or two of these  roles  in  their  community.   A  translator  may  ask  questions  in  an  online  forum  or  suggest corrections  in  data  created  by  a  researcher,  or  create  datasets  that  can  augment  existing  datasets. Communication among these overlapping communities is much easier if they have access to the same materials - at least those that are openly licensed.

19 https://jupyter.org/

20 See http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/assets/greeksyntax-tutorial.html, a Jupyter Notebook tutorial which is itself a Jupyter Notebook.

Unfortunately,  there  are  some  obstacles  that  need  to  be  considered  when  sharing  resources.    For instance:

-  The NA28 Greek text is not openly licensed, the SBLGNT is not freely enough licensed to be used in some settings, and freely licensed texts are either old enough to be unfashionable (e.g. Nestle 1904, Tischendorf, Antoniades 1904), use a text that most translation societies do not prefer (e.g. the Robertson-Pierpoint Byzantine text),  or are so new that we do not know how they will be received (e.g. the Bunning Heuristic Prototype).   Tyndale House has indicated a desire to make the Tyndale House Greek New Testament open for non-commercial use, but it is not  clear  whether this will be done in a way that does not require each project to negotiate separately.    Currently,  open  resources use a  variety of  Greek texts.   We  need a  strategy  for efficiently porting resources to multiple texts, and it would be helpful if most open resource providers used the same texts.
-  We need standards for reference systems, referring to lexemes, and describing morphology. The variety  of  systems  used  to  describe  the  same  things  makes  queries  that  span  data  sources unnecessarily complex.
-  A few additional open resources would significantly improve the usefulness of the existing ones. For Greek, a modern lexicon would be particularly helpful.  We also need to expand our support for the Septuagint.
-  Creating  open  resources  for  biblical  studies  is  not  currently  a  major  priority  for  academic institutions or translation associations, and it requires labor.  We need to find ways to fund this work.

We need to find appropriate venues for deciding how to best work together to avoid duplicate effort  and  make  our  resources  as  interoperable  as  possible.    This  will  benefit  all  three communities mentioned in this section.

## Conclusion

As  seminaries  and  universities  cut  back  on  their  offerings  of  biblical  and  classical  languages, passionate communities are working hard to develop new resources and make them freely available. These resources are valuable for translators and for serious Bible students in the majority world, and they can help us gain a deeper understanding of biblical languages.  We need to find ways to make our resources more interoperable and reduce duplication of effort, tailor our resources to support efficient and informed translation, and create tools that can make these resources available to a wider audience of serious Bible students in the majority world and elsewhere.

The  initial  steps  may  be  as  simple  as  finding  ways  to  visualize  these  resources  and  make  them available  in  translation  software,  but  the  long  term  impact  is  much  greater  if  we  see  this  as  a community building exercise that strengthens the translation community, the open data community, and the global biblical studies community.  In everything we do, we need to set clear goals, strive for excellence, and plan for everything we do to mature over time as we learn from each other in the communities we establish.

Over time, we hope this will make it easier for people throughout the world to learn biblical languages and study the original biblical texts using high-quality, freely licensed resources, and to establish an open global community of translators and scholars who can learn from each other and build on each other's work.