---
title: "Adapting Digital Biblical Resources for Translation and Teaching — Robie 2019"
description: "The author argues for displays and materials that are focused (answer the question a translator has, nothing more), concrete…"
authors: ["Jonathan Robie"]
year: 2019
venue: "HIPHIL Novum 5"
source: "https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736"
doi: "10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736"
licence: "HIPHIL Novum vols 1–8: free to read, no CC licence (all rights reserved to the authors) — read only"
licence_url: "https://tidsskrift.dk/hiphilnovum/about"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/robie-2019-adapting-digital-biblical-resources-translation/"
---
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# Adapting Digital Biblical Resources for Translation and Teaching: Harvesting low-hanging fruit and growing next generation resources

**Authors:** [Jonathan Robie](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jonathan-robie/) · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** HIPHIL Novum 5(2), 78– **Link:** [tidsskrift.dk/hiphilnovum/article/view/142736](https://tidsskrift.dk/hiphilnovum/article/view/142736) · **Licence:** copyrighted — summary only (free to read, no CC licence)

[**0** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W4391945424) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [HIPHIL Novum 5](https://openalex.org/S5406958382) · [licence](https://tidsskrift.dk/hiphilnovum/about)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736)
- [PDF](https://tidsskrift.dk/hiphilnovum/article/download/142736/186438)
- [DOI 10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736](https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4391945424)

**Authors (1)**

1. [Jonathan Robie](https://openalex.org/A5024539295) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1783920) · h 9 · 952 citations · 40 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

A short programmatic paper from biblicalhumanities.org. Since 2013 many openly licensed resources for the biblical languages have appeared (base texts, morphology, contextual glosses, treebanks such as GBI and Lowfat, discourse features, lexicons, variants), some as good as commercial ones, but translators barely use them, because publishing data is not the same as making it useful. The author argues for displays and materials that are focused (answer the question a translator has, nothing more), concrete (avoid abstractions, since each added layer loses most of the audience), maturing with their users, and excellent through testing and feedback. His worked example contrasts a word-by-word interlinear and a crossing-line syntax tree with a simple indented display of a phrase's constituents with contextual glosses, which shows subject and predicate at a glance.

## Ideas

- I1. A plain constituent display of a verse from our UD trees: one line per phrase, indented by depth, with the role (subject, object, predicate, oblique) and the MACULA English gloss, as an alternative view to CoNLL-U for readers of the manual and the course.
- I2. Make one base (the trees + dictionary) yield materials at several levels: a translator-level gloss line, a learner line with morphology, and the full tree, generated, not written by hand.

## For Mova

I1 is a small output mode for `tools/macula` (render a sentence as indented constituents with glosses) and the way to quote examples in [languages/hbo/08-syntax.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/08-syntax/). I2 applies to the Torah course and the parse database (chapter 13 §10). Lowfat, which the paper names, is the MACULA format our converter already reads.

Topics[Hebrew & Aramaic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/hebrew-aramaic/)

## Cite

Cite as Jonathan Robie. 2019. Adapting Digital Biblical Resources for Translation and Teaching: Harvesting low-hanging fruit and growing next generation resources. HIPHIL Novum 5.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736](https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736)

```bibtex
@inproceedings{robie2019adapting,
  title = {{Adapting Digital Biblical Resources for Translation and Teaching: Harvesting low-hanging fruit and growing next generation resources}},
  author = {Jonathan Robie},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 5},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142736}
}
```

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