An exciting new development is underway using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to translate Christian text from English to low resourced languages. While there is good software and online tools available for European and other high-resource languages, finding software suitable for African / low resource languages, has proved to be more difficult. These languages lack good quality machine translations through currently available machine translators (e.g. Google Translate), thus requiring a significant amount of time and human effort for a good quality translation.
The need to speed up translation and improve the quality of the translated text, has resulted in the development of an in-house project to build a contextual database using existing Christian literature – in essence training AI in the use of Christian text. This will be fed into a large language model which has a better understanding of context and will result in the speeding up of the translation process, as well as more accurate translations.
Translating English to Swahili is the pilot project that is being undertaken and the results so far are very promising. The hope is to improve the translation quality from English to more low resource languages in Africa to the point where AI powered automatic translations are of an acceptable quality for Christian literature.
