Committee Translation AI
Rough translations,
precise terminology.
I built CTAI because I wanted to read Bahá’í tablets that haven’t been translated into English yet. There are hundreds of them — beautiful, important texts sitting in Arabic and Persian with no accessible English rendering.
So I built a translation pipeline with one specific strength: terminological consistency with Shoghi Effendi’s renderings. Every theologically significant term gets looked up in a concordance of over 105,000 indexed occurrences from his translations before the AI touches it. The result isn’t polished literature — it’s a study aid. But the terminology is grounded, and that matters.
You’re welcome to use it too. Everything here is freely available.
How did Shoghi Effendi render that word?
An honest disclaimer
A study tool, not a finished translation.
A skilled human translator does something AI can’t: they reorder. They move phrases, restructure sentences, sometimes rearrange whole paragraphs to make the English read naturally. That’s the art of translation — finding the target language’s own voice for the source text’s meaning.
CTAI doesn’t do that. By design, its output is rigidly aligned to the source — phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. This makes it useful as a study tool — you can follow along in the original and see exactly what each phrase means. But it also means the English sounds stiff in places where a human translator would have rearranged things for flow.
Think interlinear Bible — not something you’d read aloud at a devotional gathering, but something you’d keep open on your desk while studying the original.
Why it matters
The Guardian built a vocabulary, not just translations.
Over thirty years, Shoghi Effendi translated Bahá’u’lláh’s Arabic and Persian into some of the most carefully constructed English prose of the twentieth century. He created a consistent vocabulary where every significant term has a deliberate rendering.
Take the Arabic قَلْبًا جَيِّدًا حَسَنًا مُنيرًا (qalban jayyidan ḥasanan muníran). 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, different register entirely.
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 تَقْلِيد (taqlíd). A dictionary says “imitation.” But in Islamic jurisprudence it carries a deeply negative connotation — uncritical acceptance of authority without independent investigation. Shoghi Effendi rendered it “blind imitation” — adding an adjective that isn’t in the Arabic because the Arabic already implies it.
He did this across tens of thousands of phrases. مَطْلَع (maṭla’) becomes “Dayspring,” “Dawning-place,” “Revealer” — preserving the luminous metaphor. Two near-synonyms for authority — سُلْطَان and مُلْك — get distinct renderings: “My sovereignty endureth and My dominion perisheth not.”
Paste a tablet into ChatGPT and none of this survives. The AI picks whatever English word seems most probable. CTAI’s concordance lookup carries Shoghi Effendi’s deliberate choices forward, even in a rough draft.
The approach
Why “committee”?
Translating sacred text isn’t one skill — it’s at least three. You need someone who knows the source language deeply (its grammar, its literary traditions, its idiomatic registers). You need someone who understands the theological vocabulary (why وَلِيّ (walí) means “Guardian” in Bahá’í usage, not just “friend”). And you need someone with an ear for English prose — cadence, clause rhythm, the difference between “luminous” and “radiant.”
“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
CTAI approximates this with a multi-stage pipeline:
Segmentation — finding the sentences
Jafar — the research assistant
The committee — three experts on every sentence
- Farid — Persian philologist. The deep poetic tradition — Sufi vocabulary, Rūmí’s imagery, Shírází literary conventions, the layered metaphors that pervade mystical Persian.
- Bakri — Arabic theologian. The philosophical and theological tradition — Qur’ánic allusions, Shí’í terminology, Bahá’í doctrinal precision, the weight that individual Arabic words carry.
- Hamilton — Shakespearean literary stylist. English’s vast vocabulary — Jacobean register, Biblical cadence, the precise shade of difference between “luminous” and “radiant.”
All three consult Jafar’s research packet. The names are a personification of expertise — they help the AI keep the concerns distinct rather than collapsing into a single undifferentiated “translate this.”
Paragraph-level review
Obviously a prompted AI is not the committee of “wise souls” that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had in mind. But the principle that translation benefits from structured deliberation across multiple concerns — research before rendering, domain expertise applied separately, review after drafting — that’s the intuition behind the approach. It produces noticeably better results than a single prompt asking “translate this.”
Background
“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
Shoghi Effendi didn’t frame his own translations as the final word. He called them an attempt and hoped his work would assist others in approaching what he called an unattainable goal. His corpus isn’t a locked vault — it’s a reference. A vast, internally consistent demonstration of how sacred translation should work.
That’s the idea behind CTAI’s concordance approach. Not copying his renderings mechanically, but making the same depth of reference he built over thirty years available to the translation process — so that even a rough AI draft uses “Dayspring” instead of “sunrise” and “blind imitation” instead of “copying.”
Franklin Lewis, the University of Chicago Persian scholar, described the Guardian’s approach as artistic rather than strictly doctrinal — aimed at recreating “the psychological and spiritual experience of reading the original.” “He has not played a single wrong note.” — Franklin Lewis, “Scripture as Literature,” Bahá’í Studies Review 12 (2004)
CTAI’s rough drafts play plenty of wrong notes. But hopefully the right ones are in the right places.
Explore
Three tools, one corpus
Model Translations of Shoghi Effendi →
The Guardian’s translations are the models that anchor everything. Every paragraph side-by-side with its Arabic or Persian source — hover any word to see its counterpart, click to see its root and spectrum.
Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
Fire Tablet
Gleanings
Kitáb-i-'Ahd
Kitáb-i-Íqán
Prayers and Meditations
Tablet of Aḥmad
Tablet of Carmel
Tablet of the Holy Mariner
The Hidden Words
Will and Testament
Source (Arabic)
Shoghi Effendi Translation
Translation Research from 2,500+ Paragraph Models →
Look up any English word to find which Arabic roots produce it, or start from a root to see every rendering Shoghi Effendi chose — with frequency, word forms, and passage links.
Root → English renderings
159 occurrences across 8 renderings View full root →
English → Arabic roots
sovereignty
Produced by م-ل-ك (dominion), س-ل-ط (authority), and ح-ك-م (judgement) — three distinct roots, each with their own spectrum.
View full page →
Pre-Provisional Translations →
Concordance-consistent rough drafts of tablets that have no existing English translation. Each one produced by the committee pipeline with Jafar’s terminology research.
CTAI is a personal study project — one person’s attempt to read more of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings with the help of tools that didn’t exist a few years ago. The translations are rough drafts, not authoritative renderings. But the concordance data is real, the terminology is grounded, and the whole thing is here for anyone who finds it useful.
“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