How this translation is made
AI does the drafting and keeps a record of its reasons. People decide what is published. Here is each step, and what it does not do.
Status: this process is being piloted on a few dozen verses. Nothing has been published yet, and no reviewer has signed anything off.
The texts it starts from
The Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Masoretic Text (the Westminster Leningrad Codex). The New Testament is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament, with readings from the Byzantine and Textus Receptus traditions noted where they differ. Grammar data, lexicons and cross-references come from openly licensed scholarly datasets. The full list, with licenses, is on the sources page.
Copyrighted modern translations are never given to the AI. Their scholarship reaches the translation the way it reaches any translator: through the manuscripts, lexicons, grammars and open notes they themselves draw on.
The translation brief
Before any drafting, a written brief sets the policies a translation committee would set: how the divine name is shown, how generic language is handled, how weights and money are given, how poetry is laid out, and how many notes a chapter may carry. Every draft records which version of the brief it followed.
Drafting
An AI model drafts each passage in context. For every choice that matters, it records the Hebrew or Greek words involved, the rendering it chose, the alternatives and who supports them, and the evidence, quoted from a specific source.
Checks that run on every draft
- Every quotation must match its source exactly, character for character, or the draft is rejected.
- Every citation must point to a real entry in the source list.
- Every meaningful word of the original must be accounted for.
- Wording is compared against existing translations, so the text is the translation’s own.
- Separate review passes check faithfulness to the original, how it reads aloud, and whether a choice takes sides where the original is open.
Human review
Named reviewers read the drafts: Hebrew and Greek scholars and an English stylist. A verse shows as reviewed only when a reviewer has signed off on it, and the app shows who, what they checked, and any dissent. Until then it shows as a draft.
What it can’t promise
No translation is neutral, and this one isn’t either: where the original can be read more than one way, the main text has to choose. What this translation promises is that the choice and its reasons are visible, so you can weigh them yourself.