Projects
We work across organizational and disciplinary boundaries, bringing together complementary expertise that rarely sits in the same room. We use advanced technologies responsibly—always with strong human oversight—and we prioritize open sharing so that resources can travel, adapt, and serve widely.
We are currently developing and maintaining these key resources for biblical scholarship and translation practitioners.
Oral Bible Translation
The Nida Institute is involved in more than 30 Oral Bible Translation projects using the so-called Cornerstone formula. These projects serve languages in Guatemala, Mexico, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Philippines. The Cornerstone approach for Oral Bible Translation works with clusters of related minority languages (typically three or four at a time) and helps mother-tongue translators internalize and translate biblical texts in a workshop setting, after which the translations are recorded. The workshops also equip translators to perform these translations in their home communities. When desired, we assist language communities in developing their own orthographies and converting the translations into written form. A typical Cornerstone project takes three years and results in the translation and verification of at least 25 chapters of Scripture.
Project MARBLE
Working in tandem with United Bible Societies, the Nida Institute manages Project MARBLE (Modular Aggregation of Resources on the Bible). This initiative connects major language translations to their original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek roots, anchoring them within an extensive network of specialized academic and contextual datasets.
Bible translations in languages of wider communication to their Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source texts, which are in turn connected to a wide range of background resources. The Nida Institute, in close collaboration with United Bible Societies, is stewarding Project MARBLE (Modular Aggregation of Resources on the Bible). MARBLE links Bible translations in languages of wider communication to their Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source texts, which are in turn connected to a wide range of background resources that have been localized into multiple languages, including: → Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Reinier de Blois) → Semantic Dictionary of the Greek New Testament (based Louw & Nida's lexicon) → Textual commentaries such as the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project → Nearly 200 video clips → Thousands of vetted images These resources can be accessed in a variety of ways, including through: → Bible translation tools such as Paratext, AVTT, SLTT → A freely accessible website, which also contains a user-friendly interface that allows complex searches in the ETCBC4 database
Bible Online Learner
The Nida Institute is a leading partner in Bible Online Learner (Bible OL), which provides free access to the Hebrew Bible in the ETCBC4 database and to Nestle’s 1904 Greek New Testament text with grammatical annotations. Teachers can use the platform to create exercises and exams for their students. In addition, the site offers a complete and free Hebrew course, including video lectures and exercises, covering all essential vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and translation skills required by several accrediting institutions (VU, AU, PThU, ETF). This course is developed for Andrews University by professor Oliver Glanz. The Online Professor, Nicolai Winther-Nielsen trains-the-trainers to use Bible OL as consultants for Bible translation and instructors of Biblical Hebrew in Africa (see https://theonlineprofessor.org/global-learning/). Director of Nida, Dr Reinier de Blois, is advisor on projects. Winther-Nielsen’s course material Global Biblical Hebrew is accredited at Fjellhaug International University College in Oslo, Norway, but can be adjusted to local institutions and demands in the Majority World.
The Kairos Project
The Kairos Project is an initiative to cultivate a digital library, full of data sets and prompts that can be used iteratively to create new resources. These five pieces of work are one answer: a way of working with AI that keeps people in command, an environment that turns open data into published resources, an account of how the biblical authors structured what they wrote, and the analysis everything downstream draws on. The sub-projects in the Kairos Project work in tandem with each other. Human at the Helm puts people at the center of A.I. and helps teams building with A. I. to stay in command of it. Scripture Pipelines is a production environment for scripture content: open biblical data (Awesome Biblical Data) and A. I. turned into published resources, with a documented trail from every claim back to its source. Discourse Flow utilizes the author's own structure, recovered from linguistic evident - freely licensed and machine-readable, for the languages that have no commentary at all. Book Storehouse is a structured analysis of a whole book, from its narrative arc down to what a person would have seen and heard in a single scene.
Linguistic Tools for Paratext 10
The Nida Institute, together with our partners at SIL, are working on an extension for Paratext 10, which is to add additional linguistic functionality to this tool for Bible translators. Our goal is to integrate FLEx technology into tools, making it possible to view the target-language text in an interlinear format. The functionality will make it possible to: → perform a linguistic analysis of the target text and store grammatical data → automatically propose parsings for words and phrases → search the target text for specific grammatical patterns → maintain a concordance and lexicon of the target language
Paratext 10 Co-pilot
The Paratext Copilot is designed to let Paratext developers, Bible translation organizations, Translation Consultants, and other sophisticated users create AI-enabled tools to support research to support new kinds of quality checking, custom checking for a particular organization’s requirements, or custom checking used by a translation team or a regional cluster. Generic GPT prompts can be parameterized and saved so that the Paratext Assistant makes them available to the appropriate set of users – all Paratext users, all Paratext users in a specific organization, all Paratext users on a specific project, etc.  The basic foundation for this work was built in 2026. In 2027, we will focus on making this functionality usable for target users, working with focus groups. We will also focus on using Ears to Hear book summaries and other trusted sources to answer user’s questions about a passage. We will also explore ways to use data from the Linguistic Tools, Biblical Terms, and other project-specific resources in GPT checks.
Videos
