Targum - A Multilingual New Testament Translation Corpus

Targum is a multilingual New Testament translation corpus with unprecedented depth in five European languages: English, French, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. It contains 651 translations (334 unique) collected from 13 source libraries and spanning 1525–2025.

This repository contains the public release subset: 302 translations distributed under public domain or open licenses.

Named after the ancient Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible (תרגום, "translation"), the corpus prioritizes vertical depth over linguistic breadth, making it possible to computationally analyze a wide spectrum of historical periods and confessional traditions within each language.

Also available on HuggingFace: mrapacz/targum-corpus.

Corpus Scale

Language	Code	Total	Unique	Public subset
English	eng	390	194	191
French	fra	78	41	44
Spanish	spa	102	53	29
Polish	pol	48	29	25
Italian	ita	33	17	13
Total		651	334	302

"Total" is the number of translation instances collected across all 13 source libraries (the same translation may appear on multiple sites). "Unique" is the number of distinct translation editions after deduplication. "Public subset" is the number of instances distributed in this repository under public domain (237) or open licenses (65).

Structure

corpus/
  {site}/
    {iso}/
      {id}.jsonl     # one verse per line
index.tsv            # metadata for all 651 translations
copyrights.tsv       # copyright text and status per translation
book_coverage.tsv    # which books each translation covers
manifest.json        # summary statistics

Each JSONL file contains one verse per line:

{"book": "MAT", "chapter": 1, "verse": "1", "text": "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ..."}
{"book": "MAT", "chapter": 1, "verse": "2", "text": "Abraham begat Isaac..."}

book uses USFM 3-letter New Testament codes: MAT MRK LUK JHN ACT ROM 1CO 2CO GAL EPH PHP COL 1TH 2TH 1TI 2TI TIT PHM HEB JAS 1PE 2PE 1JN 2JN 3JN JUD REV.

Embeddings

Pre-computed text embeddings are available for all translations at both chapter and verse granularity, produced by two Qwen3 embedding models:

Model	Granularity	Files	Size
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B	chapter	656	~270 MB
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B	verse	656	~7.7 GB
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B	chapter	656	~2.4 GB
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B	verse	656	~75 GB

Embeddings are stored as Hive-partitioned Parquet files under embeddings/ on HuggingFace:

embeddings/
  {model}/
    language={iso}/
      site={site}/
        translation={id}/
          granularity={chapter|verse}/
            data.parquet

Where {model} uses XxX as a separator (e.g. QwenXxXQwen3-Embedding-0.6B). Each data.parquet contains columns key (e.g. MAT 1 for chapter, MAT 1:1 for verse) and value (the embedding vector).

Loading chapter embeddings for one translation:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_parquet(
    "hf://datasets/mrapacz/targum-corpus/embeddings/"
    "QwenXxXQwen3-Embedding-0.6B/language=eng/site=ebible.org/"
    "translation=eng-web/granularity=chapter/data.parquet"
)

Metadata

Each translation in index.tsv is annotated with manually verified metadata:

• canonical_id — a standardized identifier for the translation work (e.g. kjv, nkjv). Any version presented under a new name receives its own unique identifier.
• canonical_version — the specific edition or revision (e.g. 1611, 4th edition).
• canonical_year — the year of the specific revision.
• copyright_status — one of public_domain, open_license, or copyrighted.

This canonicalization allows researchers to define "uniqueness" for their own needs: they can perform micro-level analyses on translation families (e.g. the KJV lineage) or conduct macro-level studies by deduplicating closely related texts.

Full field list: site, iso, translation_id, translation_name, translation_abbr, canonical_id, canonical_version, canonical_year, num_books, num_chapters, num_verses, num_words, copyright_status.

Quickstart

import json
from pathlib import Path

corpus = Path("corpus")
# Load one translation
verses = [json.loads(line) for line in (corpus / "ebible.org/eng/eng-web.jsonl").read_text().splitlines()]
print(f"{len(verses)} verses loaded")

# Load all English translations
translations = {}
for path in sorted(corpus.glob("*/eng/*.jsonl")):
    translations[path.stem] = [json.loads(line) for line in path.read_text().splitlines()]
print(f"{len(translations)} English translations")

Or via HuggingFace datasets (note: path prefix is corpora/ on HF):

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("mrapacz/targum-corpus", data_files="corpora/ebible.org/eng/eng-web.jsonl", split="train")

Source Data

Translations were collected from 13 libraries: bible.audio, bible.com, bible.is, biblegateway.com, biblehub.com, bibles.org, biblestudytools.com, bibliepolskie.pl, crossbible.com, ebible.org, jw.org, laparola.net, obohu.cz.

Only public domain and open-license translations are included in this release. The remaining 349 copyrighted translations are available to researchers upon reasonable request for noncommercial research purposes.

Citation

This corpus will be published at LREC 2026 (Palma, Mallorca, 11--16 May 2026). Citation TBD.

A preprint is available at arxiv.org/abs/2602.09724.

License

Corpus metadata and derived annotations are released under CC-BY 4.0. Individual translations retain their original licenses as recorded in copyrights.tsv.