Nathan Shrefler, a doctoral candidate in German applied linguistics, won first place in the Arts and Humanities category at the 2008 Graduate Research Exhibition with his poster entitled "Readability and German Bibles."

Nathan Shrefler's dissertation project is devoted to Martin Luther's Bible translation and the modern translation Hoffnung für alle (Hope for all), which were both produced with the intent of providing their contemporaries with a readable translation of the Bible. The goal of his project is to apply statistical measures of readability to this assertion to see which version was more successful in that endeavor.  This includes corpus analysis of various aspects of the texts, including lexical density, clausal complexity, nominalization, and lexical bundles.  This project contributes to research on Martin Luther and his contributions to the German language and Christianity as well as to research on modern translations of the Bible and how they are received by their readers.   Nathan Shrefler's research applies methodologies used primarily with academic texts to the question of readability and the Bible, providing a new perspective to the question of what makes an important text like this accessible or not to its readers.