Microchip missionary

Talk about an engineering challenge! Translate a 2000-page document into 4000 different languages. And can we have that by yesterday, please? This is the task facing Wycliffe Bible Translators as they move into the new millennium. Of the world's approximately 6000 languages, two-thirds need substantial work done on the New Testament, and over 90% do not have most of the Old Testament. The amount of effort needed to complete the task? Only about 100000 person-years (not including all the support work that goes into each translation). Wycliffe and other similar missionary organizations are increasingly turning their attention to computational methods of recording and analyzing data and, more recently, to automatic computer translation techniques, which is the author's focus. He has been involved with the Mikrokosmos Machine Translation Project at New Mexico State University (http://crl.nmsu.edu/Research/Projects/mikro), which concentrates on methods for knowledge based machine translation between Spanish, Chinese and English. He is now applying these methods to Bible translation.