OpenEDGeS

The EDGeS Diachronic Bible Corpus is a diachronically and synchronically parallel corpus of Bible translations in Dutch, English, German and Swedish, with texts from the 14th century until today. The wish list underlying the final compilation of 36 Bibles was: they should be a) first editions of complete Bible translations, and not modernizations; and b) translations in a narrow sense (not: harmonies, paraphrases, rhyming Bibles, etc.) into a language variety that was current at the time of publication. Furthermore they c) must have made a historical impact, typically through wide dissemination; and d) their text must be available electronically, with a traceable link to the original. The documentation included in the archive and the related publication give information about the extent these ideals were met for the final selection. For all Bibles, we include at least the New Testament, and for most we also have the Old Testament. A smaller number of Bibles have Apocryphal books. The parallel Bible texts were split into book-chapter-verse segments, and automatically aligned at verse level, using the contemporary Dutch Nieuwe Bijbelvertaling as a pivot. We also have compiled meta-information for each of the Bibles. OpenEDGeS is the open subpart of EDGeS, distributed under a public license, made up of 31 historical Bibles.