bible-corpus

A multilingual parallel corpus created from translations of the Bible.

Here you can find a multilingual parallel corpus created from translations of the Bible. This an effort to create a parallel corpus containing as many languages as possible that could be used for a number of NLP tasks. Using the Book, Chapter and Verse indices the corpus is aligned (almost) at a sentence level. (There are cases where two verses in one language are translated as one in another).

Following a similar effort by Philip Resnik and Mari Broman Olsen at the University of Maryland, I have encoded the text of each language in XML files using the Corpus Encoding Standard. Refer to the following paper for more details about the creation of the corpus:

• A massively parallel corpus: the Bible in 100 languages, Christos Christodoulopoulos and Mark Steedman, Language Resources and Evaluation, 49 (2)

Armin Hoenen from the Text Technology Lab at the Goethe Universität, has created tokenised versions of four languages (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese). They are included in this collection but they can also be found here.

If you are looking for a quick way to generating a raw text version of each Bible, you can use following Python snippet (replace lang with the name of the XML file):

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
lang = 'English'
root = ET.fromstring(open(lang + '.xml').read())
with open(lang + '.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as out:
    for n in root.iter('seg'):
        out.write(n.text.strip() + '\n')

or for a specific book:

book_id = 'b.GEN'
with open(lang + '-' + book_id + '.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as out:
    for n in root.findall('.//div[@id="'+book_id+'"]/*seg'):
        out.write(n.text.strip() + '\n')

Follow this link for a collection of tools for reading/processing the corpus.