Although the New Testament is full of nouns that describe actions (Love, faith, salvation, and grace are some examples), the group of languages I work with very rarely express actions with nouns. All of these concepts, whether expressed by a Greek verb or noun in the NT, must be translated as verbs in the languages I work with.
This makes consistently rendering the multiple forms of a Greek word very difficult.
- When we are using the Biblical Terms tool, our renderings for the noun form will usually be the same as our rendering for the verb form, so we have to remember to put that rendering in both Biblical Terms in the list.
- When we are checking for consistency across a book, a series of books, or a whole project, we need to check both the Greek noun entry in the Biblical Terms list and also the Greek verb form in the Biblical Terms list. Sometimes there’s an adjective, too.
- Sometimes we struggle to come up with a rendering for a noun and later discover we already had a rendering for the verb form.
- Or we work to make a verb consistent throughout a book and later discover that the noun form also occurs in that book, but it was not in our Biblical Terms list.
- Or we filter our list for terms that occur in the current book. That sometimes means we have the Greek verb in our filtered list, but not the corresponding Greek noun.
So I am trying to think of ways to handle this part-of-speech mismatch between the Greek terms in the Biblical Terms list and the parts of speech they must map to in the target languages in a way that helps us translate all the words in a Greek word group consistently.
Make a note of it? I have tried making a note in the “Summary Note” section of the Biblical Terms rendering dialog that says something like, “our rendering for this term needs to be the same as the verb form.” I need to also make the same sort of note in the other Biblical Term. We have nothing in the user interface that will allow us to link to that other term, and you can only have one rendering dialog open at one time, so if we want to see what that rendering is, we have to go find that term, which may or may not be in our current filtered list.
Combine related words into one term? We could try combining whole groups of words into one entry in the list of Biblical Terms so we can track their renderings together. We would still have the old Biblical Terms as provided with Paratext if we ever want to see just the verb form occurrences. We have already created new Biblical Terms in our Biblical Terms list for our languages, so we know how to do edit the occurrences in a Biblical Term, but it would take a lot of time.
The advantages of doing this are obvious, but I wonder what the disadvantages might be.
If the NT contains word groups where a noun in a word group means something significantly different from the verb in the same word group, then this idea might not work well for that word group. I can’t think of an example of this.
I am only talking about the NT here, but the same issues would apply to OT Biblical Terms.
Surely we’re not the first team to struggle with this, so I’m hoping somebody has some good advice for us.