A Case Study of FLExTrans Performance on the Field

One of the recent tools that has come on the scene to accelerate Bible translation is FLExTrans, a linguistically-based machine translation system for translating between related languages. It has been employed in several projects over the last two years, so how has it performed? This paper seeks to show for the first time how FLExTrans has performed on the field in several language projects that have done significant translation work with the tool. One project each in Asia, Eurasia and the Americas will be the main sources of information. By looking at the evidence, both empirical and non-empirical, we can see what utility this tool offers for the Bible translation movement. The results are encouraging. This paper also will reflect on the ethics of employing FLExTrans as a tool for Bible translation in a language project. It will compare and contrast ethical principles as applied to FLExTrans and other tools, both AI and non-AI, that seek to accelerate Bible translation.