Translating 4.5 Million Words
The Problem
Enduring Word was already translating its commentary the conventional way, at more than five years and close to $1,000,000 per language once the work of making a finished translation actually publishable is counted. The effort was real. The economics were the ceiling: at that price, most of the languages its readers speak were never going to get funded.
What We Built
A machine translation pipeline that carries document structure, formatting, and scripture references through intact, with human review concentrated where it changes meaning rather than spread evenly across four and a half million words. Italian and Portuguese are published. Hindi and French are in preparation. Each ships in months rather than years, for under a tenth of the conventional cost.
Arabic and Farsi had already been translated at full human cost and still could not ship. Making them production-ready for the website and the mobile app, with structure, headings, and scripture references repaired across the entire corpus, was its own engineering effort. The translation is rarely the whole problem.
