Old French Bibles project

The Old French Bibles project is making medieval French translations of the Bible available for linguistic, historical, literary, and cultural research.

Although vernacular Bible translations became widely available after the invention of the printing press and during the Reformation, portions of the Bible were actually translated throughout the Middle Ages, with the earliest known complete French translation dating to the mid-13^th century. Most of these early translations have remained consultable only in manuscript form, either in archives and libraries or online if microfilms or full-color scans have been made digitally available. This leaves many obstacles for research. Medieval manuscripts are laborious to read, cannot be easily navigated or searched, and are not aligned to allow for comparison. Although attempts have been made to create modern editions of these manuscripts, the number and size of the manuscripts make this a monumental task.

However, recent advances in optical character recognition (OCR) for handwritten texts have made it possible to render these manuscripts machine-readable. The Old French Bibles project is training OCR models to do just that for dozens of French Bible translations from the pre-printing era. Our goal is to create a parallel corpus of French Bible translations from the 12^th to the 20^th centuries. This will allow linguists, historians, and other researchers to directly compare translations of the same passage over time. As we produce transcriptions and editions of the manuscripts, they will be made freely available at this site.

The project is led by Jim Law at Brigham Young University, with the assistance of the BYU Office of Digital Humanities, a number of student research assistants, and students in Prof. Law's History of French course. The project is currently funded by the BYU College of Humanities.