Dig into Greek and Hebrew with MACULA and MARBLE

Whether you are translating into a written, oral or sign language, understanding the biblical source text is a vital first step.

There are many resources within translation drafting programs like Paratext, translationCore and Autographa which can help the translator to explore the text and the world within which it was written. In addition, you may want to explore other resources…

Explore the Biblical text with MARBLE

Head to semanticdictionary.org to view the MARBLE (Modular Aggregation of Resources on the Bible) biblical language data. You can then choose to either explore the Hebrew Old Testament or Greek New Testament texts.

Click on a word to see more information about that word, and other verses where it occurs.

You can also choose to view it in the dictionary:

Click on “Domains” to view the biblical words according to their semantic domain:

You can also use the site to search for images, videos and articles related to the biblical text, allowing you to become immersed in the source text and the world in which it was written.

Explore the Underlying Linguistic Data with MACULA

If you are comfortable parsing xml files, you’ll find a wealth of linguistic data relating to the Hebrew and Greek biblical texts at the MACULA github repositories, including syntax trees, morphology and linguistic annotations.

• MACULA Hebrew
• MACULA Greek

If that kind of raw data seems overwhelming to you, there should be a user-friendly viewer released soon!

What might the future hold with advanced technologies?

As data on the biblical text becomes more widely available to both developers, there is potential for advanced technologies to leverage machine learning capabilities to explore patterns within the data. Tools can then be created that compare draft translations in new languages with the highly analyzed data in the original Greek and Hebrew, to assess how clearly and accurately the draft translation expresses the meaning of the original text.