Artists for Israel · Feature race · 7,000 starters

The Great 2033 Stakes

Every horse is one of the world's languages. They break from the gate together, and the finish post reads 2033. This race is greater than the 1973 Belmont Stakes won by Secretariat's jockey Ronald Joseph Morel Turcotte. At the finish line every tribe and tongue gets something infinitely more precious than what the winning jockey receives which is 10% of the purse: each tribe and tongue gets the infallible inerrant Roadmap to Heaven (You'd be lost without it), the Holy Bible in their heart language.

Year2026
Starters7000
Home0

Silks and Tack (saddle, bridle, stirrup etc): One Rider, One Horse

Every starter in the field is dressed like this. The jockey's outfit and the horse's gear are built to be spotted through binoculars from the grandstand.

1

Reading the horse racing racecard

The horse
One language, carrying its own text data. Run it through a model and that text becomes tokens, small numbered word pieces.
Saddle cloth number
Each horse has a program number. In a model, every word piece gets an ID number from a vocabulary list. That number is how the computer looks the word up.
Silks and cap
The owner's colors. Here they stand for the language community: native-speaking believers and trained consultants who check every verse.
Blinkers
They keep a horse looking where it matters. Self-attention does the same job, weighing which words in a sentence matter to each other.
The whole field at once
BERT-style reading is bidirectional. The model sees the words on both sides of a word at the same moment, the way a horse race referee (steward) sees the whole race and all the pack.
The jockey's hands
Human feedback. Reviewers' corrections train a reward model, and that model helps steer the next run.
Furlong poles
One pole per year from 2026. They mark the drafts, checks, and consultant sign-offs along the way.
Leaders and late closers
Languages with lots of text break fast. Low-resource languages start slower and close hard as more reviewed data arrives.

The named horses and their positions are illustrative, not a forecast for any language.

The Scripture Forge stable

Every piece of a racehorse's gear has a job. Every piece of Scripture Forge has a job too. Scripture Forge is a free website from SIL that helps people translate the Bible into their own language. Here is what each color in the race really stands for.

1 What makes the horses run: the computer helpers

The horse's strong body NLLB-200
A computer helper made by Meta that has read writing in about 200 languages. Scripture Forge teaches it using the books a team has already translated. Then it writes a rough first try of the next chapters. People always check and fix that first try.
Saddle cloth number SIL Machine & SILNLP
Free tool kits from SIL. They cut words into small pieces and give each piece a number, like the number on the saddle cloth. They also line up words that mean the same thing in two languages.
The starting gate Serval
SIL's starter. It tells the big computers which job to run next: a practice run to teach the helper, or a real run to write a draft. Then it opens the gate.
The tote board ClearML
The glowing board shows every horse's time. ClearML does that for the computer helpers. It writes down every practice run so the team can see which one did best.
A retired racehorse Thot
An older helper that guessed your next few words as you typed. It has been retired, and the newer helper does that job now.

2 What the team wears: the software

The silks Scripture Forge web app
The shirt everyone on a team wears. Lots of people can work on the same chapter at the same time, on a phone or a laptop, and see each other's changes right away.
The cap Paratext
The cap always matches the silks. Paratext is the big computer program Bible translators have used for years. Work and notes travel both ways between Paratext and Scripture Forge, so they always match.
The armband stripe Transcelerator
An add-on for Paratext that has ready-made questions about each passage. People in the language community answer them in Scripture Forge. Their answers show whether a verse is clear.
The bright leg wraps Offline saving
Leg wraps protect a horse on rough ground. Scripture Forge keeps your work safe on your own device when the internet stops working, then sends it in when the internet comes back.

3 Where the race is run: the machines

The dirt track Cloud computers with GPUs
The hard running happens far away on very strong computers with NVIDIA graphics chips. Because of that, nobody in a village needs an expensive computer.
The grandstand The database
The grandstand has a seat for everyone. The database (Scripture Forge uses MongoDB) keeps a place for every project, note, and answer.
The jockey Phones, tablets, small laptops
Jockeys are small and light. So are the devices the translators and checkers use. Any ordinary web browser works.
The white noseband A microphone
It sits right by the mouth. People can record their answers out loud instead of typing, which helps people who listen to God's Word more than they read it.

4 One lap around the track

  1. The team shares the books they have already translated.
  2. Serval opens the gate, and the strong computers teach the helper.
  3. The helper writes a rough first try of new chapters.
  4. Native speakers fix it together on their phones and laptops.
  5. The community answers questions, by typing or out loud.
  6. Everything goes back to Paratext, and a consultant signs off.

The purse is still open

Help Fill the Purse

Secretariat's jockey took home ten percent of a purse. In this race, every tribe and tongue that crosses the finish post receives the whole prize: the Holy Bible in its heart language. You can put that prize in the hands of the people who are still running.

Give by Zelle to Artists for Israel International (AFII)
Zelle phone number / ID 212-245-4188
Registered account name Congregation Beth Shalom

Open your bank's app, choose Zelle, enter 212-245-4188, and confirm that the recipient shows as Congregation Beth Shalom before you send. Gifts sent this way benefit the Bible translation initiatives of Artists for Israel International.

What your gift to AFII pays for:

  • The Orthodox Jewish Bible (OJB)
  • The Orthodox Yiddish Triglot: Hebrew, Yiddish and English side by side
  • The interlinears: the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Tanakh
  • The tech outreach that carries Scripture toward all 7,000 languages by 2033

Every furlong pole between now and 2033 is a year of drafts, checks and sign-offs. Help a horse reach home.

Where to read more: