TBTA: A Natural Language Generator Based on Linguistic Universals, Typologies, and Primitives

The Bible Translator’s Assistant (TBTA) is a multilingual natural language generator designed specifically for Bible translation. The system incorporates extensive typological, semantic, syntactic, and discourse research into its semantic representational system and its transfer and synthesizing grammars. Functional-Typological Grammar has been incorporated into the system’s grammar, and Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory guided the development of our semantic representational system. TBTA has been used extensively with two languages in the Philippines and is currently being used in seven other languages spoken in Kenya, Russia, Papua New Guinea, India, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. For each target language we develop a lexicon and grammar. TBTA then produces initial draft translations that are grammatically correct and easily understandable, but need to be polished by the MTTs. The drafts optionally include an abundance of implicit information, footnotes, and study notes to make the meaning of the texts clear. MTTs are able to edit TBTA’s drafts of historical narratives into presentable first drafts at a rate of approximately 60 verses/hour. The edited drafts are then taken through the customary team check, community check, and consultant check. Our tests indicate that the drafts produced by TBTA reduce the time and cost of a translation project by approximately 35% without any loss of quality.