Committee Translation AI
The best translations
come from a committee.
“Whenever it is possible a committee must be organized for the translation of the Tablets. Wise souls who have mastered and studied perfectly the Persian, Arabic, and other foreign languages… must commence translating Tablets and books containing the proofs of this Revelation.”
— 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan
There's a reason for that. Translation of sacred text isn't a solo sport. Every word carries layers — theological, literary, historical, cultural — and no single mind can hold them all at once.
Select a phrase to see how Jafar analyzes it
The standard
Then Shoghi Effendi raised the bar.
For over thirty years, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith translated Bahá'u'lláh's Arabic and Persian into some of the most architecturally coherent English prose of the twentieth century. He didn't just translate words. He built a system.
Take the Arabic قَلْبًا جَيِّدًا حَسَنًا مُنيرًا. Literally: “a good, beautiful, luminous heart.” Three physical adjectives. Shoghi Effendi renders this as “a pure, kindly and radiant heart” — three spiritual qualities. Same structure, entirely different register.
His widow Rúhíyyih Khánum explained: he believed “Arabic synonyms usually meant the same thing but English ones always had a slight shade of difference which made it possible to be more exact in rendering the thought.” — Rúhíyyih Khánum, The Priceless Pearl, p. 202
Or consider تقلید (Taqlíd). A dictionary says “imitation.” But in Islamic jurisprudence it carries a deeply negative connotation — the uncritical acceptance of authority without independent investigation. So Shoghi Effendi rendered it “blind imitation” — adding an adjective that isn't in the Arabic because the Arabic already implies it to any educated reader.
He did this across tens of thousands of phrases. The word مطلع (Maṭli') is consistently rendered with solar imagery — “Dayspring,” “Day Star,” “Dawning-place” — preserving the cosmological metaphor that pervades the original. The root م-ل-ک becomes “sovereignty,” “dominion,” or “kingdom” depending on context — sometimes two in the same sentence: “My sovereignty endureth and My dominion perisheth not.”
Franklin Lewis, the University of Chicago Persian scholar, put it beautifully: Shoghi Effendi's approach was artistic rather than strictly doctrinal — aimed at recreating “the psychological and spiritual experience of reading the original.” Like a musical conductor, he chose the tempo, the attack, the mode of expression — and “has not played a single wrong note.” — Franklin Lewis, “Scripture as Literature,” Bahá'í Studies Review 12 (2004)
The invitation
He built it to “assist others.”
“This is one more attempt to introduce to the West, in language however inadequate, this book of unsurpassed pre-eminence among the writings of the Author of the Bahá'í Revelation. The hope is that it may assist others in their efforts to approach what must always be regarded as the unattainable goal — a befitting rendering of Bahá'u'lláh's matchless utterance.”
— Shoghi Effendi, Foreword to the Kitáb-i-Íqán
Read that again. Shoghi Effendi didn't frame his translations as the final word. He called them an attempt — and expressed the hope that his work would assist others in approaching the unattainable goal — a befitting rendering of Bahá'u'lláh's matchless utterance. His corpus isn't a locked vault. It's a model — a vast, internally consistent demonstration of how sacred translation should work.
That's why CTAI puts his entire corpus of translations at the center of every deliberation. Not to copy his renderings, but to learn how he chose — and to give future translators the same depth of reference he built over thirty years, available in seconds rather than decades.
He wrote every sentence aloud. He kept a 1934 Webster's Dictionary at hand. He read Gibbon and Carlyle for their prose rhythms. He revised the Hidden Words four times — 1924, 1925, 1929, and 1954. The result was “a grand synthesis of English majestic writing — Jacobean, Restoration, Victorian, and Edwardian — blended seamlessly into a new literary creation.” — Glenford Mitchell, “The Literature of Interpretation,” World Order 7:2 (1972–73)
From the corpus
See what that looks like in practice
2,530 paragraphs, indexed and searchable
يَا ابْنَ الرُّوْحِ
فِي أَوَّلِ القَوْلِ امْلِكْ قَلْبًا جَيِّدًا حَسَنًا مُنيرًا لِتَمْلِكَ مُلْكًا دائِمًا باقِيًا أَزَلًا قَدِيمًا
O SON OF SPIRIT!
My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be
a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.
What's happening here
جَيِّدًا حَسَنًا مُنيرًا → “good, beautiful, luminous” becomes “pure, kindly, radiant” — physical adjectives elevated into spiritual qualities.
مُلْكًا → “sovereignty” here — but “dominion” or “kingdom” elsewhere. Context decides.
أَزَلًا قَدِيمًا → two near-synonyms for eternity expanded into three: “ancient, imperishable and everlasting”.
Every paragraph gets a deep reference page. Explore →
The problem
Today we have instant AI translations.
You can paste a Tablet of Bahá'u'lláh into any large language model and get a translation in seconds. It'll be grammatical. It might even be elegant.
But it won't be this.
AI translation averages everything
LLMs have been trained on millions of translations — every quality level, every tradition, every amateur effort. When you ask for a translation, you get the mean. Shoghi Effendi's distinctive voice? Drowned out by sheer volume.
AI translation forgets
Shoghi Effendi's complete translations span thousands of pages. No context window can hold them. That means no AI translator can know that مطلع appears 23 times in the corpus, always with solar imagery, unless someone tells it.
AI translation works alone
A single prompt produces a single rendering with a single set of biases. When there's a hard call — "sovereignty" or "dominion"? "chosen" or "singled out"? — a single model silently picks one and moves on. The tension between options, which is often where the insight lives, vanishes without a trace.
The shift
But what if it didn't have to?
What if you could give three AI translators distinct specializations — literary, cultural, theological — and teach them to consult? What if you gave them a research assistant with the entire indexed corpus of Shoghi Effendi's translations, searchable by keyword and meaning?
What if, before anyone translated a word, that research assistant looked up every theologically significant term in your passage and assembled a dossier of exactly how Shoghi Effendi handled each one — with full surrounding context?
What if each translator worked independently — no peeking — and then they critiqued each other's renderings? What if they argued about it, revised, argued again, and only settled when they converged or admitted genuine disagreement?
That's CTAI. A translation committee that never forgets a precedent, never tires of deliberation, and shows all its work.
Meet the committee
Four Virtual Translators engaged in Virtual Consultation
Each agent brings a different lens to the same text — and they argue about it until they get it right.
Jafar — The Research Assistant
RETRIEVAL + ANALYSISDoes its homework before anyone translates a word
Analyzes every significant term in your source passage, searches the full indexed corpus — keyword and semantic — and assembles a Reference Packet: a dossier of every relevant precedent, with full surrounding context.
Example report: إنصاف (inṣáf)
Both map to “Justice” in HW §2 — elsewhere SE splits: عدل → “justice”, إنصاف → “equity”
Dr. Penelope Hamilton
Literary & Fidelity
Keats. Gibbon. The King James Bible. She ensures the translation reads like literature, not a gloss — while flagging every deviation from the literal meaning.
Prof. Reza Farid
Persian & Cultural
When your passage echoes Ḥáfiẓ or Rúmí, he catches it. Expert in Sufi terminology and the specific methodology Shoghi Effendi used in the Kitáb-i-Íqán.
Dr. Ahmed Bakri
Arabic & Theological
The Arabic says تقلید. A dictionary says "imitation." Dr. Bakri says "blind imitation" — and can tell you exactly why Shoghi Effendi added that adjective.
Then they engage in quality (simulated) Bahá'í consultation
All three renderings are revealed. Each agent critiques the others. Agreements get locked in. Disagreements get re-translated. They consult until they reach consensus — or until they identify genuine, principled disagreement worth preserving. Every phrase keeps its deliberation notes.
“The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions.”
— 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, §44
In action
Watch them work a single phrase
From the Kitáb-i-Íqán
قد اصطفاه الله و جعله مطلعاً لنفسه
Literal: “God has chosen him and made him a dawning-place for His Self”
Jafar · Research Agent
مطلع appears 23 times in the corpus. SE uses solar imagery every time: “Dayspring,” “Day Star,” “Dawning-place.” Six instances of “Dayspring” in Gleanings alone. اصطفی splits between “chosen” (casual) and “singled out” (emphatic).
Dr. Hamilton
“God hath chosen Him and made Him the Dawning-place of His Own Self”
Preserves grammatical structure. Every semantic unit accounted for.
Prof. Farid
“God hath singled Him out and made Him the Dayspring of His Self”
“Singled out” has more rhetorical weight. “Dayspring” is SE's signature rendering here.
Dr. Bakri
نفس (Nafs) here isn't casual “self” — it's the Divine Essence as manifested in creation. The emphatic “Own Self” signals we're not talking about ordinary selfhood. Major doctrinal distinction.
After deliberation
“God hath singled Him out and made Him the Dayspring of His Own Self”
Output
One translation, three ways to read it
Every commissioned translation is freely available once completed. The people who most need these texts shouldn't have to pay for them.
Translator's Report
The full deliberation record — every rendering, every critique, every precedent citation. The minutes from a five-hour meeting, compressed into a searchable format.
Phrase Study
Side-by-side interactive view. Click any phrase to expand its history — the spiritual successor to that old DOS concordance tool, but one that shows you not just what but why.
Reader's View
Right-to-left Arabic, left-to-right English. Hover to illuminate, click for a note. For people who simply want to read.
Try it
How did Shoghi Effendi render that word?
2,530 translation pairs · 7,662 source segments · keyword + semantic search
The model
Translate once. Share forever.
Good AI translation isn't cheap. The multi-agent deliberation — independent renderings, iterative critique, assembly, fidelity review — can cost hundreds of dollars for a book-length work.
But a translation only needs to be done once.
Institutions commission and fund the work. The result enters the cache permanently. After that? Free for everyone. A student in Lagos. A devotional group in Pune. A study circle in Santiago. Same high-quality translation, same full annotation, zero cost.
Explore
Dive in
١٨٨
sacred texts
Best-Known Works
188 works by Bahá'u'lláh, the Báb, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and Shoghi Effendi.
2,530
parallel paragraphs
Translation Corpus
Side-by-side source and translation across 12 works. Every paragraph gets a deep reference page.
“”
methodology & analysis
Articles
How Shoghi Effendi made his choices. Why those choices matter. What we can learn from them.
CTAI doesn't replace the intimate knowledge that sacred translation demands. It's infrastructure for that devotion — making sure no precedent is overlooked, no nuance is lost to the limits of memory, and no translator works alone when they could be working in consultation.
CTAI is an individual initiative to explore the possible uses of Shoghi Effendi's translation corpus to improve AI translations.