Counting Verses that Contain Text

Question

Hi all - I’m administrating for a project that is translating Old Testament portions for a Catholic Lectionary. We are tracking progress outside of Paratext with a spreadsheet to make sure that every portion makes it through all the checking stages we require.

I am able to check in with the team once every few months or so. I have been using History and Recent Changes to review the portions they have drafted (or back translated) and checking them off my list if they are complete. Recently, we made a mistake in our review and I realized I had missed progress they had completed in Psalms. The easiest way I could find to make sure I caught all of their progress was to go through the project, chapter by chapter, and manually count all of the verses that had text. Yikes!

In the past I have tried to use the Verse Text Checklist to pull up a list of which verses were filled in per chapter, but there was no way to filter out empty verses. So it was genuinely easier to just count completed verses manually.

This month, I will need to submit a report for our organization on the number of verses that were drafted in the last half year, and I am dreading going through each chapter and manually counting all of the verses that have text. Almost none of their work is full chapters. Please tell me someone has come up with a way to count verses that have text??

(Along those lines, it would be great if future versions of Paratext could adapt the program planning to support translation of scripture portions! I would happily enter all of my references into the plan if it could help me track stages of progress within Paratext instead of outside.)

Answer 1

I think there are a couple of ways to calculate the number of verses if the team is using a project plan and is checking off verses as they go.

1. If you had a before and after Project Health Report you could see the percent change in completion and knowing how many verses are in scope of the plan you could work backwards to the number of verses.
   

   

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2. I think you could also use the charts in the Assignments and Progress window.
   It has a progress since setting that you could set to the desired date. Again it gives percentage of the verses being managed by the plan. You would need to know the number of verses being managed by your plan and work backwards.
   

   

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3. Lastly, you can use RegexPal to count the number of verses in a given range that has content. If you want to go that route, I am sure someone on this list could help you with the needed regular expression.

Answer 2

KmSilvey:

(Along those lines, it would be great if future versions of Paratext could adapt the program planning to support translation of scripture portions! I would happily enter all of my references into the plan if it could help me track stages of progress within Paratext instead of outside.)

Unless I’m misunderstanding what you are wanting, Paratext Project Progress has the ability to support portions (down to chapter granularity). This was added in 9.1.

Answer 3

KmSilvey:

(Along those lines, it would be great if future versions of Paratext could adapt the program planning to support translation of scripture portions! I would happily enter all of my references into the plan if it could help me track stages of progress within Paratext instead of outside.)

As FootRunning says, Paratext already has the ability to track the progress of a project even if it only includes some portions. We call them “Priorities”.
This was done precisely because before if you knew in advance that only certain chapters of some books would be worked on and you used a project plan for this, you had a lot of “error messages” on chapters that would not really be worked on.
Today you can define “Priorities” and indicate which chapter of which books are included in this so that the reviews and graphs that “Assignments and Progress” provides apply only to those chapters.

How to set a Priority: What's New in Paratext 9.1 - Paratext

Another forum post on Priorities: Setting the Current Priority

And here is information on how to apply a project plan: https://paratext.org/videos/en/paratext-features-training-videos/project-plan-training-videos/

Using the “Assignments and Progress” will allow you to have a more precise control of the progress as you have the revision tools directly applied to the text being translated. In addition, Paratext generates statistics and progress graphs.
Creating a priority will also be useful for other Paratext tools and checks.

Saludos,
anon689242.

Comments

I am working on a new article about managing partial books. Yes, priorities is the way to do this. The article will set the context for using priorities in this way (They can be used to manage whole books too.) Here is the link to the video in its current state: Paratext: Managing Partial Books on Vimeo

By the way, here is an earlier threat on this topic:
Project Plan and Partial Books - Questions - Paratext Supporter Site

Answer 4

The original poster mentioned her specific need for counting lectionary passages in the Old Testament. While it is true Priorities can be used for partial books, if they can only be used for chapters and not individual verses, then this might not help for this specific need for the lectionary. I wonder if it might be possible to go down the root of using Bible modules for the lectionary. You might find them in your "My Paratext 9 Projects/_Modules folder, or a version can also be found at https://lingtran.net/Example-Modules . The progress of verses could then be seen as the percentage of verses available for that module, a figure that is clearly displayed, or you can get more information with an easy click to “check for errors and untranslated references”.

Comments

Yes, one of the main uses for modules is lectionaries. You can publish a lectionary with the uptodate version of all the verses, but there are no management tools in the Module feature set.