Episode 1
· 37:01
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Bible translation innovation podcast. This is a monthly show brought to you by the E10 Innovation Lab. And here, we are going to explore some new methods and technologies that are advancing Bible translation worldwide. We're going to discuss new ideas and talk about what has already been proven to accelerate scripture accessibility. My name is Isabella Skerenzi, and I am the communication strategist at the E10 Innovation Lab.
Isabella Scarinzi:My job here is to tell stories of what our team is doing and also communicating to equip the scaling of emerging methods in bible translation. I will be your facilitator for this podcast, but I'm also joined here today by a few of my colleagues. One of them is Joel Matthew. Hi, Joel.
Joel Matthew:Hey. What up?
Isabella Scarinzi:Joel, why don't you share a little bit about yourself with us, maybe how you got involved in Bible translation, and also what your current role with the lab is?
Joel Matthew:Yes, we'd love to do that. And thank you for introducing me and for setting this up for us. So yes, I'm Joel Mathew, and I live in Los Angeles with my wife and three year old son. My background is mostly in computer science with a focus on natural language processing that's a fancy way to say technology for human languages, and machine learning, which is synonymous with more commonly known as AI, what is known as AI today. I worked in the industry, so I did my education in India.
Joel Matthew:That's where I was born and raised. And then came to The US about ten years back and did more studies and worked for the University of Southern California at a research institute called Information Sciences Institute, where most of my projects were for The U. S. Government, including DARPA and the National Institutes of Health. In the meanwhile, I've always been excited and interested to support the Bible translation needs on the field.
Joel Matthew:And I've helped develop some applications for easily drafting and checking the Bible, and also, been part of multiple research endeavors for developing technology for extremely low resource languages. What I mean by that is languages that don't have a lot of technology support for them yet. So the big ones do well, of course, English and what we would call as languages of wider communication, like maybe Hindi. But there are a lot of these small ones where the Bible translation is currently active. And for those, we need more technology support.
Joel Matthew:And currently, I work for the E10 Innovation Lab as the strategy leader for translation technology, but I get to work alongside an awesome team to explore and experiment ideas and techniques to help achieve the E10 All Access goals for 02/1933. That was long, but thanks.
Isabella Scarinzi:That's awesome. Jill, you're speaking from the West Coast today, but we also have here with us Klappy or Christopher Klappy. We call him Klappy for short, and he's speaking from the East Coast from Florida. So hi, Clappy.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Hello, Isabella. Yeah, I'm currently in Orlando, but I'm from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Still call that home. Maybe, maybe hopefully soon I'll be fully settled into Orlando and get used to this heat.
Isabella Scarinzi:We love Orlando. We're always over there with our team. But yeah, how has your journey in Bible translation been like, Klappy?
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Yeah, thanks for the introduction. As you said, my name is Chris Clapp. Everybody calls me Klappy. It's been a nickname that I've had in the professional field since I started my career. Apparently I laugh and smile a lot and people called me Happy Clappy.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:So that's where the name came from. And I tried to shake it a few times from different companies I worked with, but somehow it resurrected each time.
Joel Matthew:That's great.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Yeah. Most of my career, I've actually had interactions with Joel for like fifteen years, like off and on back and forth over the past fifteen years. So a lot of my career path has interacted with him. And I think most of my highlights, I would say, have been somehow connected with Joel and the projects he's been working on. I'm also with the Eaton Innovation Lab.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:I'm one of the strategy leaders. We have technical titles, but nobody really understands them. So we're all strategy leaders. My focus is on multimodal translation tools and I help kind of look into the latest emerging technology around that and how we help our partners who are making those tools and improve their tools. Not that they can't improve them themselves, but helping them collaborate and mature their tools with the emerging innovations that we're seeing.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:I started my career as a software developer and self taught, don't have any formal education. I just love to solve problems and just started hopping startups, you know, I was the sole developer for probably six or seven failed startups, but it was a lot of fun. And each time we got better at it, and I say we, it was me and whoever I latched onto, find somebody with a good idea and then loved making the technology happen behind the scenes. And then I got an opportunity for a startup to build technology for Bible translation. Technically we started off building for missions and it led to building machine translation tools for Bible translation.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And that's where I got to meet Joel. So Joel and I had some interactions as I was building out this machine translation technology. We were packaging it up and had a profitable business, selling that to other companies. And we were taking that same technology that was doing dynamic machine translation models for minor languages. So the perfect use case for that was Bible translations that didn't have any translation models for it.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:I just went way too technical for an intro. But we hired Joel to build the first user interface for the Bible translation tools that we were building back then. So that's kind of where we both kind of bridged both of our careers into the Bible translation world, building software for the Bible. And transitioning from that company, I got an opportunity to join directly with a Bible translation organization. So I got in-depth, engrossed into what the real problems were, witnessing them firsthand and not just imagining it from the other side of the world.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:So I got to travel finally to India. Didn't get to see Joel. He was already in LA, but I got to meet his dad and the rest of his family. So it was really good meeting his family and seeing the work that was going on in India and Bible translation. Seeing that drafting wasn't necessarily the hardest part of Bible translation, but checking was.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:So I get to study more on the natural language processing and seeing how we could use that for the checking process. So not just machine translation for the drafting, but getting into the checking process, QA quality assurance as well. So that was a good pivot point for myself and developed a few tools along the way. Fast forwarding a few years from there, I was able to join the Innovation Lab. And then in the Innovation Lab, been able to do similar type things using natural language processing and looking at the latest advancements in AI and seeing how we can help our partners collaborate and work together to take advantage of these innovations and bake them into our tools and our processes.
Isabella Scarinzi:Wow. I actually didn't know that you guys knew each other for over ten, fifteen years, so I feel like I'm crashing your party here a little bit. But just to contextualize for our listeners, if you do not know what ETEN is, ETEN stands for Every Tribe, Every Nation, and it is a collective impact alliance of bible translation organizations. The alliance is working towards a set of goals that Joel actually mentioned a little earlier, and it's what we call the all access goals. We're working towards achieving them by 2033.
Isabella Scarinzi:So the e ten Innovation Lab, which is the team that we are a part of, we work as a catalyst for innovation within the alliance. Well, to kick start our discussion today, I want us to focus a little bit about the actual role of innovation in advancing E10's mission. We're currently in that journey to eradicate Bible poverty by 2033 So to Joel and to Klappy, why is it important that we talk about innovative ways to translate the Bible?
Joel Matthew:Yeah, this is such an awesome question. I feel we could muse over it for hours because in some ways, nobody's going to ever say innovation is a bad thing. At the same time, specifically for where we are at with Bible translation in the E10 space, with the goals of 2033 The rate at which we are going, the current pace of Bible translation, from what we understand, is not gonna cut it for us to meet those goals. So something must change.
Joel Matthew:We cannot expect to do the same things and achieve this goal. And if something has to change, we come back to the drawing board of innovation, really, and understand and try to figure out what are we changing and why are we changing it so as to be able to achieve these goals. So I think it is critical for us in the Bible translation space to actually be thinking proactively about innovation or change in a meaningful and a collaborative manner that actually makes the difference in our processes, in our quality of checking, in our drafting speed, in our ways of publishing, in our ways of access to the content. So it's not just nice to have. I think it is necessary to have at this stage of Bible translation that we are at in E10.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Yeah, Joel, I completely agree. There is no way if we don't change the traditional way of doing Bible translation that we will meet our all access goals. And with our role at the lab, you know, that being our primary focus, you know, our main job is looking at the all access goals. And are we on trajectory to actually meet those goals? And then what is the timeline?
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And when I first joined the lab, I think it was like twenty years off. Like there was no way. We had accelerated it from a hundred years away to being able to do it in 2050 to now I believe we're up to date to 02/1941. So 2041 is the expected completion date at our current trajectory. Now, of the organizations a part of the Collective Impact Alliance of E10 have all agreed that all access goals are important to us.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And we are committed to getting those done by 02/1933. And to complete those by 02/1933, we will definitely have to accelerate. Now, I've watched a lot of different things happen over the past fifteen ish years that we've been a part of Bible translation. And I think no matter what the innovation is, if it excites and motivates the team and if they feel empowered, I've seen that accelerate Bible translation as much as fancy technology. So one of the things that I learned is working with Joel and other teams around the world is that when people feel empowered to own the process and to actually not just a part of the Bible translation process, but to speak into the tool that's being built for them, I've seen the sense of ownership go up and I've seen their speed definitely increase.
Joel Matthew:Yeah, I'd like to just respond to that too. So Klappy, you're hinting at some critical points there, which sometimes we can be under the impression that technology is suddenly going to solve everything. We're going to come up with the best AI model and the best software and the best app out there, that suddenly, if you throw it at people, it's going to solve Bible translation. And having at least seen quite a bit of this along with you, Clappy, and being at the lab, having the privilege to associate with so many partners, we know that is not true. We know that it's not suddenly a technology that is going to come and solve all problems.
Joel Matthew:God has entrusted the work to us humans, and we need to be leading the charge. And technology is an important tool, but to be careful not to delegate the responsibility completely. And I think more and more, we may be tempted to do that with LLMs seeming to want to to do that more and being able to do some of that. And again, they are good tools. I think we should use them appropriately.
Joel Matthew:And the other thing you mentioned, which I really resonate a lot with is we don't want to come in to a community, a small language community, and tell them this is the way of doing Bible translation, and you just follow suit. And that there is and you just follow suit and there is no difference that you can make in this process. When given the opportunity to own the process, the community is able to come up with native solutions that make sense in their context to problems that probably somebody sitting hundreds and thousands of miles away cannot imagine themselves and actually move forward effectively, efficiently. And it's almost like a mindset change. The church, the local church is the center for missions biblically, as we understand it.
Joel Matthew:And that local church has the responsibility also to steward the ministry of Bible translation also. That is God given, that there is no center of power anywhere in the world to dictate that. There are best practices and guides and tools that we can equip them with, but God has uniquely placed them there to do that. So that process, owning that process suddenly, as you said, encourages them to actually do it all the more vigorously and diligently and efficiently despite the tools. Because I've seen no matter how good the technology is, they usually come in the way for a very efficient team.
Joel Matthew:And so they're able to work around these things just because of their excitement and desire to continue to work forward.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:So exciting to talk about that. I know we said this was going to be a technology podcast talking about innovation, but at the heart of it, the technology doesn't matter if the team isn't properly motivated and excited about the project and the process, right? Not saying that it isn't important, even if they don't have those elements, but that's the biggest accelerator. And so we can just layer on top of a sense of ownership. And, you know, taking a step back, observing the past fifteen years, I've seen a huge shift going from missionaries doing the translation work for the churches around the world, which is a very good thing and it has worked and served the church very well for hundreds of years.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:But now that there's a people group inside of a church inside of every people group around the world, nearly every people group, the churches are now wanting to be a part of the process. And so in the previous model, we needed to do something called Scripture engagement. So once the Bible was done, it was gifted to the people group in that language group. They received a Bible and they needed to be taught how to read the Bible and how to use the Bible. And they had these programs to kind of encourage people to know what to do with the Bible translation once they had it.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Well, when you create something, you're more likely to use it. And so that Scripture engagement has moved to the very beginning. And so from the outset, the Church owns the process, they own the technology, they own the translations, and they want to use what they've worked so hard on for so long. And they just naturally own it and move forward with it.
Isabella Scarinzi:Yeah. Thank you so much guys for answering that. So we talked a little bit about innovation. I wanted to also touch on this podcast so listeners know what they can expect from future episodes. So as co hosts, what are you hoping to achieve with this show?
Isabella Scarinzi:And what's the whole point and purpose of us recording these episodes?
Joel Matthew:Yeah, thanks, Isabela. I don't want to make it sound that we don't care about innovation. I know we mentioned the process and people are paramount. However, we have an opportunity to also look at technology and especially some of the emerging trends in technology and opportunities to see how we can best apply those to the field of Bible translation and specific projects that are ongoing. So my hope in this podcast is to bring our listeners alongside with us in a journey of wrestling through a lot of this unknown or very new technology, because that's what it looks like for us internally at the lab also.
Joel Matthew:And even to some extent individually, we're all figuring some of these things out. And it's not like we have very canned solutions for us, handed to us that we just need to place in the hands of the translators in the field. There's a lot that's going on trying to first see if any of this, which part of this makes the most sense for us to apply, because we don't want to cause confusion on the field by just throwing people into the deep end of a lot of this new technology. So we are in the process of struggling and wrestling with what is good out of this and what is not. And experimenting in small scale with trusted people who understand these are experiments and not to just take them as truth and learn from that and then slowly integrate that into existing tools or maybe develop newer tools that then make these sort of advancements accessible to the larger translation community.
Joel Matthew:So my hope is that we expose some of that raw emotion here and gather some feedback because I do not want to ever think that we are the only people doing this. There's way more smarter people out there who we'd love to bring along and see some of the problems that we are seeing and get their input and their feedback also as we try to meet the all access goals.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Yeah, I definitely want to talk about tech. Joel and I love talking about what can be done. We've been dreaming together this whole time, you know, for over a decade. And I still have a notebook when Joel and I were together eight years ago and in person for the first time and we just dreamed together of what Bible translation would be like in ten years. And it's just, we've had so much fun together and been dreaming of an opportunity to get together, work together.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And so I definitely want to talk about tech and our vision for where things can be. But the other thing I really want to touch on is the humanity of what we do, right? Like, there's a raw emotional element to change, right? When we talk about innovation, there's challenges along the way. It's not just the technical thing.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:It's about change management and the resistance to change. So you can't even get the change management if people aren't willing to change. So fundamentally, we're going to do our best, I believe to delicately talk about some challenges that we face on the political side of things. Obviously, we don't want to be inconsiderate, you know, we'll be very kind about how we talk about things. But there's a real emotional element that we navigate just about every day dealing with new technology and what it means to encourage organizations to embrace new technology.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And sometimes it's not the translation teams on the field being introduced to AI, and they've never heard of AI before. You know, it's not that sort of thing. Many times it's us as developers. It's me. It's Joel.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:It's our colleagues that we've worked together with for so long, when we introduced new ideas on how to do software development. I mean, just recently, Joel challenged me on something we've been working on for eight years. And I had to grapple with the change management of thinking through a new worldview of how I saw collaboration. And so I think it would be great for us to dive into and unpack how we challenge and shape our own thinking grapple with some concepts ourselves.
Joel Matthew:Just responding to that, Clappy, you're not alone in that struggle because I went through it myself before I brought it to you. We share a lot of that. Really hope that we are able to communicate some of that through our conversations here with our listeners to kind of give them a sneak peek of what's going on on the inside and how best they could even contribute or be part of it, even in prayer, because, yeah, ultimately, we need God to help us through all this. Yeah.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:To follow-up on the other thing that I'd love to hear or us to talk about is the vision that the partner organizations have. So all of our partners have a grand vision on how they want to reach the world. And they all want to see Bibles translated in the people groups that they're serving. And seeing how each of them have this calling and this vision and their approach that they have. They all differ, right?
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Sitting at the Innovation Lab, all of our partners have this grand vision to reach the world, but they're all different. And so one of the advantages of us being at the Innovation Lab, we're kind of instead of just being a peer, we're kind of of on the outside on the fringe, enable a partner with all of them and help them see where their overlaps are and not look at how they change each other's minds on how they reach the world and how they do all the Bible translation by using their process. It's more about, we both kind of have this overlap on this part of the process. What if we work together on this aspect? Or what if there's opportunities for us to do this together?
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And so I think that's one of the innovations or the one of the ways we address innovation at the lab, as well as helping guide partners find opportunities where they can overlap and maximize the collaboration between each other. Sometimes that's not even technology.
Joel Matthew:Right. And I think I don't want this to be left unsaid that we definitely want to give shout outs and links and sneak peek previews and updates on technology and experiments that are being developed in collaboration with Innovation Lab. And some of it is what, like Clappy is saying, through partners who have come to see and work alongside with us, buying into the vision and into the promise of new technology. And hopefully this podcast will help you stay updated without having to go to many other places to figure out what's happening.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Yeah, that would be good if it was informative, as well as just a place for us to talk about the emotional side of things, right?
Isabella Scarinzi:So I'm definitely hearing a theme of disruption and collaboration that's going to be across this podcast. If we were to get really specific, Joel, you mentioned some snapshots, some highlights, some updates. What are some really specific topics that we're going to cover in this show?
Joel Matthew:Yeah, Isabela, I think there are quite a few things that we have started going, started working on. And there are a list of other things that we hope to start soon and are in early conversation. So I'll mention a few and let Clappy continue answering the question. One of the things that we are actively working on is to develop AI first multimodal end to end Bible translation application that's open source, open licensed, and easily usable by people in the field. And currently, we're calling it ScribeNext, but we hope to have a new name for it.
Joel Matthew:So that's ongoing, and and we are continuing to make progress on that. Of course, our desire and the way of working is gonna be very iterative. So we're gonna start small and, get something on the field, get some early feedback, and make changes from there rather than having to wait for a longer time before making a release. Other than ScribeNext, we are also working on a couple research directions, mostly to do with oral Bible translation because we see a lot of needs that are unmet in tooling for, orality in general. There has been a lot more of time and therefore tooling available in the text realm.
Joel Matthew:But in the audio space, these sort of things, are lacking, and we see a lot of advances made in the AI realm for orality. You know, things like speech to text, text to speech, voice cloning, or voice sound normalization, background noise removal. All of those are important technologies that have applications in viral translation on the field. So we are hoping to run some experiments, work with some partners. We already have a few things that are promising.
Joel Matthew:So that's one other direction we are focusing on. And of course, in quality checking in the text realm, we are also working with Grikroom to better automate a lot of manual processes processes and quality checking that can be laborious. So we have a lot of statistical AI available to us that we can leverage to easily and confidently do a lot of checks for us and then turn it around as a review rather than having us go and manually make changes in thousands of spots in the text. And that can massively speed things up for us in the checking realm. So that's another area we are actively working on and the focus currently is to find ways to integrate that sort of ability into translation editors.
Joel Matthew:Klappy, over to you.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Yeah, definitely look forward to diving into those topics as well and nerding out on some of the specifics of those tools. And some of them aren't even mature enough to be tools just yet, but we'll be able to talk about them and how they're emerging into shaping into tools. You know, some of them are just features that are coming into our tools. For me, every time I try to make a plan of what I think the next six months will look like in innovation. AI kind of comes in and disrupts it.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And so instead of looking at specifics, I'm going to kind of speak more general. But specific topics that I'd like to cover would be what multimodality actually means, right? Multimodal tools, multimodal translation. Multimodal is more than just meaning, you know, a text translation, an oral translation or a sign translation. It's also the process in which the Bible translation is done.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And so by us having a topic that talks about multimodal processes and multimodal tools, maybe even just a topic of multimodality, in general, we can bring in some experts into the room here in the podcast and kind of dive into what that topic looks like and what that means on the field. And Andy Kellogg has done a ton of research with this team. Inviting him in to help us dive into that topic of what his team has been exploring in that area would be great. But that touches on the other topic that Andy has been researching and leading at the lab has been quality assurance QA And looking at how we leverage AI in the quality assurance, as Joel mentioned, he's been working on Greek Room and delivering that as a product for Bible translation for these low resource languages. There's a lot of different new ways for us to use AI for Bible translation, not just in the drafting, but also the post production things like checking quality assurance and then as Joel mentioned, like audio refinement tools.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:So, as we look at quality assurance and using AI and quality assurance, I believe we're scratching the surface right now. We just got started. There's more emerging capabilities in AI right now in that space. I believe that's going to be the one thing that we really get to explore over the next six months or year in realize things are possible that we couldn't see coming. Because right now we understand that yes, AI is going to get better at drafting and eventually it's going to be useful for oral drafting.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:And there are things that we're going to see, you know, happening because we're already seeing it come to pass, but there are going to be things that kind of emergent behaviors from AI that we're not going to see coming in the next few months that we'll be able to surprise our audience with.
Isabella Scarinzi:That's great. So definitely a lot of exciting conversation and discussions coming up. Thank you so much to Clappy and Joel as co hosts. I can definitely tell you guys are excited for so much of the innovation that's happening across bible translation. So for our listeners, this is a monthly show.
Isabella Scarinzi:If you wanna stay updated on what's happening with the Eton Innovation Lab, I recommend you go check out our website at lab.e10.bible. There's a lot of great resources that you can explore there as well. Joe and Claffey, any very quick last words that you have?
Joel Matthew:I'm excited and looking forward to dive into some of these topics, and have more people also join us in the future. Yeah, just looking forward to it.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:As for me, yeah, just wanted to end by saying, I am excited to do this podcast. This is something that we've been looking forward to do together, not just to have an excuse to spend more time together, but also to share behind the scenes of what's going on at the lab. I think to leave with a thought or an encouragement for our listeners, Many times we try a new tool or a new technology and we test the early version of it and we recognize it fell short. I'll admit we've all delivered tools that were early and it didn't quite deliver the expectations. So give that tool another shot.
Christopher "Klappy" Klapp:Always be willing to continue to retry technology that you've already written off. So one of the things that we witness in the Innovation Lab maturing of technologies. So if you've been an early partner of somebody testing out a tool or technology, be willing to give it another shot when they say that they've addressed the issues that you encountered in the beginning. It's usually worth giving them another shot.
Isabella Scarinzi:Thank you again. Very exciting things coming up ahead and we will see you at the next episode of the Bible Translation Innovation podcast next month.
Jake Doberenz:The Bible Translation Innovation Podcast is brought to you by the ETEN Innovation Lab. This episode is edited and produced by Jake Doberenz with Theophany Media. Your hosts were Joel Mathew and Christopher Klapp with facilitation by Isabella Scarinzi. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, and we'll be with you again next month.
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