After a little trouble trying to actually make an audio recording of a KJV version of the Bible I saw a need for it to be more easily readable in modern English. I am not a linguist, or a biblical expert, or even a very good Christian, but I think there is a need for an open & redistributable copy of the bible. So working from the Project Gutenberg copy of the King James Version of the bible, and checking against three others I have locally, I have written a program to translate the Bible into more 'modern' English. I am going slowly and checking all changes made to the orginal using 'diff's (computer-ese for showing the differences between two similar files). I am also distributing the program I'm using so that anyone who wants to can make the same conversion(good) or can make suggestions to help the program make the translation even better.
Translator Version 0.17 |
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Translator Version 0.15 |
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Some things to note; this is a very important project to me. I want to make sure the while 'modernizing' the King James english I am not losing ANY of the meaning behind the words. What God says through the Bible to the reader is of the utmost importance and not getting it right, or mis-leading someone is the worst thing I could do. So I am careful and look at every change made by the program for both the effects and the side effects of any changes made.
The code is currently very crude (and written in the Perl programming language) as the project roles along it will improve and get more complete. If you find it usefull please check for errors in the Result text and email me . So I can check things out and fix them up. Words & Word usage is important, punctuation is also very important. My current (v0.15) program makes no changes to punctuation, only to words themselves.
While the original King James Bible is in the Public Domain, I am releasing this one under the Creative Commons license: 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License .
To summarize, This work, the KJV translation, is copyright 2005 & 2006 Donald Cowart, if you are distributing this work you must give attribution for the original work to me, but may distribute your own variations of it.
With KJV Translator Version 0.15, it takes 15 seconds to translate the entire KJV Bible on my Athlon 64 2800+ doing around 30 word replacements. Version 0.17 takes 1:29 (m:ss) for 72 word replacements.
My Friend Shawn is helping me with this rather odd (but good) project. His code to do it will appear here soon as well.