Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Subscribe now to get this column delivered straight to your inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr. at therossnews@gmail.com.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
Christian missionary Leslie Taylor preaches in English and Japanese each Sunday at a bilingual church in the Tokyo area.
A military brat who spent time as a child in Japan as well as Florida and Tennessee, the father of three prepares his lesson in English.
Then he goes through his manuscript — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph — to translate it into Japanese.
“That translation aspect can obviously be very difficult at times,” Taylor said.
ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot made by the company OpenAI, has helped improve the missionary’s process.
“I do as much as I can by myself, but sometimes it helps with particularly complicated sentence structures,” Taylor said of the AI program, “or I may ask it to explain a nuance, etc.
“It’s still necessary to know Japanese because sometimes it gives mistaken translations — or just slightly off my meaning — so I need to discern,” he added. “But it is a helpful tool in the process to be sure. I would never even consider it as a source for any actual content, however.”
Roughly 6,500 miles away, Dion Frasier, a minister in suburban Columbus, Ohio, relies on ChatGPT to translate his sermon into Creole.
“We have a growing Haitian population in our area, and they are starting to attend church regularly,” Frasier explained. “We translate and hand out copies to families each week.”
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Shutterstock photo
Faith. Family. Fastballs. 