Bible English-Luganda Parallel Corpus

Dataset Description

This dataset contains 32,291 parallel sentences in English (en) and Luganda (lg), derived from biblical texts. It is designed primarily for training and fine-tuning machine translation models, particularly in low-resource language scenarios.

Languages

English (en)
Luganda (lg) - ISO 639-1 code: lg

Data Format

The dataset is provided in a format compatible with the Hugging Face datasets library. Each entry consists of a dictionary with the following keys:

english: (string) The sentence in English.
luganda: (string) The corresponding translation in Luganda.

Example:

{
  "english": "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.",
  "luganda": "Kubanga Katonda bwe yayagala, ensi bw'ati, n'okuwaayo n'awaayo Omwana we eyazaalibwa omu yekka buli muntu yenna amukkiriza aleme okubula, naye abeere n'obulamu obutaggwaawo."
}

Data Splits

The dataset contains a single split:

train: Contains all 32,291 parallel sentences.

Dataset Creation

The parallel sentences were extracted from biblical texts. The initial groundwork for sourcing and aligning portions of this data was conducted by Richard Kimera, to whom credit is given for his valuable contribution. The final dataset of 32,291 sentence pairs was then processed and formatted for use.

How to Use

You can load the dataset using the Hugging Face datasets library:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset_name = "kambale/luganda-english-bible-corpus"
dataset = load_dataset(dataset_name)

# Access the training split
train_dataset = dataset['train']

# Print the first example
print(train_dataset[0])

Expected Output (will vary based on the actual first entry):

{
  'english': 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.',
  'luganda': 'Kubanga Katonda bwe yayagala ensi bw'ati, n'okuwaayo Mwana we eyazaalibwa omu yekka, buli muntu yenna amukkiriza aleme okubula, naye afune obulamu obutaggwaawo.'
}

Licensing

The license for this dataset is Apache-2.0. Please ensure your use case complies with the license terms. The underlying biblical texts may have their own licensing conditions or be in the public domain depending on the versions used.

Citation

If you use this dataset in your research, please consider citing it.

@misc{kambale_kimera_2025,
    author        = {Wesley Kambale and Richard Kimera},
    title         = {Bible English-Luganda Parallel Corpus},
    year          = {2025},
    url           = {[https://huggingface.co/datasets/kambale/luganda-english-bible-corpus](https://huggingface.co/datasets/kambale/luganda-english-bible-corpus)},
    publisher     = {Hugging Face}
}

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Richard Kimera for his foundational work in collecting and aligning the initial data for

Datasets:

kambale
/

luganda-english-bible-corpus

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