Our Commitment to Transparency

We understand the gravity of a project like The Faith Received. It is no light thing to publish nearly 70,000 primary sources of the Christian faith in one place, over 2,000 of which are translated into English for the first time. A project of this scope and scale never would have been possible without the help of artificial intelligence.

But we are not ignorant of the promises and the perils of using this technology in this way. It matters that the quality of these translations is good, not that they simply exist. Which is why we do not see The Faith Received as a static resource, but as a living project, and one that requires radical transparency and openness to iteration.

With that in mind, we have undertaken seven steps to ensure transparency and ongoing improvement of quality.

1. Everything translated by artificial intelligence says so

   Every machine-translated work carries a Translation Transparency panel at the top of the page. It names the language the text was translated from, before the text rather than in a footnote after it.

2. The original is always beside the translation

   Every machine-translated work carries the English, the original language, and, where the source digitised one, the page scan the original was read from. All three are in the Text Tools menu on every work, so anyone can check a sentence against the page it came from.

3. Anyone can report a problem

   Every work has a Report An Issue button in the same menu. Reports go to an inbox that is reviewed. Works are updated as deemed appropriate.

4. The reports are counted in public

   Each work shows how many issues have been reported against it and how many have been settled.

5. Every correction is dated and published

   When a work is corrected, what changed is written into that work's own history with the date. A translation that changes silently is worse than one that was wrong, because a reader who checked it once has no way to know it moved.

6. A translation committee is being formed

   We are assembling credentialed translators to begin checking these works and making the changes their reading calls for.

7. Every work says where it stands

   Works carry a status of Reviewed or Needs Review. Until a translator has read a work, it says Needs Review, because silence has to mean nobody has checked this and never that it is fine. A reviewed work should be trusted further than one that has not been.

Report an issue

Every work carrying a machine translation Counting…