AI for Bible translation: Why real people matter

By John Tan | Wycliffe Today Autumn 2025 |

When I met with David Duncan, he told me that the purpose of AI software is to speed up translation. It will not replace the Bible translation process. As an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) manager, as well as a Bible College and language student, I found this thought comforting.

Translation is not simply replacing words and phrases with that of another language. It is also carrying the meaning of those words and phrases across. Artificial Intelligence (AI) works very well with the process of substituting words and phrases, but, being artificial, it cannot be expected to handle meaning well.

Comprehension

How would you translate the word ‘lamb’ for people who do not know of such a creature? We could replace ‘lamb’ with the word for a similar animal in the target language, but this could lead to theological difficulties with interpretation later. Software can easily handle word substitutions, but it will not so easily teach such new concepts to a group of people.

Grammar

Both human intelligence and software can analyse how sentences are formed. But people tend to take shortcuts. We create new patterns or exceptions to the grammatical rules. Because of this, software can help us get the grammar right most of the time, but we still need a community to confirm and correct the translation work.

Theology

It can be quite easy to add our own interpretations to a text but Bible translators are not supposed to do this. A translation team checks work for each other to help remove interpretation biases. AI will come with its own biases based on the data it is fed. We need to check this data well, either before or after the software works with it.

Bible translation has come a long way in the last decade in particular. It used to take many years to translate the New Testament, and many translators could not see themselves working on the Old Testament as well within their lifetime. 

Scripture translation software can create a very rough draft of the Old Testament overnight if we feed it the New Testament in the target language. But it will still take about 16 years for people to work through this very rough draft to make it usable. Having computer software to help speed up the Bible translation process is exciting. Even so, we still need a team of … real people!