ai translation
We're exploring the idea of using AI agents, via simple user interfaces, as a way to orchestrate Bible translation tasks both within an app and by leveraging outside tools and APIs.
While we're still in the early stages of this exploration, we've already found that it's possible to build a Bible translation app using VS Code as a base.
Our proof-of-concept plugin has one simple task: when the user says "the right way to say X is Y", the plugin will discern the user intent and update the lexicon.txt file (the project's dictionary).
What we want to do next is to use the AI agent to orchestrate the translation process, to take the next step of suggesting updates on any verses that are implicated in the lexicon change.
This is where VS Code comes in.
We realized we can use VS Code as a base for a Bible translation app. It's open source and has a lot of features that you would need for a Bible translation app. It's also very extensible, and operates at the highest echelons of enterprise software, and can be localized into many languages of wider communication (e.g., the Chinese localization has over 24 million downloads!).
Providentially, we have an example of someone forking VS Code and building a fully functional AI-native app. A huge congratulations to the folks at Anysphere/Cursor. This app is awesome.
The craziest thing about this is that they did it in a matter of months, with a small team of developers (I think it was 2-3 or so people). They forked it in March 2023, and I tried the app in July, and it rocked.
I think there are some learnings to gather here for the Bible translation world: VS Code provides a great base for building an AI-native app, and it seems feasible to fork it and build something that is useful for translators by leveraging the fact that VS code has done all of the hard stuff already (like mature source control, tested localization, an impressively stable architecture with over 51K published plugins, live sharing for instant remote collaboration, and more).
Adding translation functionality suddenly seems like a small task in comparison.