I got to thinking about that, and I came up with a theory: Machine translation of course requires a corpus of texts that exist in at least two languages, a Rosetta Stone. The Bible is the most translated book on Earth. For tiny or dying languages, the kind with some thousands of speakers at most, the Bible may be the only written work that's ever been translated into or out of that language. So the Bible is their entire training corpus, and it's not enough.
The most fascinating thing about the place was that later the whole area had been designated a special scientific survey protection region. They protected the environment by scientists bringing money to do research to pay the locals (kind of like eco tourism protection for areas that aren't very safe for tourists). These folks were mostly hardcore evolutionary biologists rather than creationists like the missionaries, so there were older folks living in the village who in their life had gone through the history of western philosophy: they grew up with animast beliefs, converted to christianity as teenagers and now are experts on evolution. Conversations with them about the nature of existence remain some of the most inspiring and interesting in my life, I recorded a bunch and keep meaning to transcribe off cassette tape sometime.
More information for the curious here: https://pngbiodiversity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Crate...
to an extent, I understand the concept of studying the old plant remedies for what is actually useful from the plant and which remedies really do not harm but do no actual good either. dosing is important and using raw plants makes that really hard. creating clean extracts of known qualities makes a helluva lot of sense. i just think bigPharma took the concept too far.