My 85 year old grandma has been getting into reading various bible translations from her iPad. In order to improve her Hindi reading skills, she was looking for a side-by-side translation of a Malayalam bible and Hindi bible. While we could find Malayalam-English and Hindi-English versions, we couldn’t find a Malayalam-Hindi one that she could access on her computer or iPad.
I decided to help her out and the result is Parallel Bible. I have also uploaded the source code to Github.
The application is static site generator using Razor templates – I took this approach as I couldn’t host a Ruby on Rails or .NET website using my current hosting provider. It uses jQuery Mobile as my grandma uses her iPad for the majority of her browsing, and I wanted the site to be reasonably usable on a mobile. To run the application, the bible data itself must be downloaded for the English version, but is screen scraped for the Indian translations. The translations are then merged during the template execution process.
I did find it interesting that the number of chapters and verses did vary per translation. It was more frequent with the English vs Malayalam where there were quite a few instances of ±1 verse.
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