Adding notes, Biblical term renderings, interlinear to resource texts - Why?

Question

In Paratext 7 you could add notes, renderings, and interlinear information to resource texts. You could not however send/recv this data … if you wanted to share it with someone else you needed to find the appropriate files and manually copy them to another machine.

In Paratext 8 we made it easy to download resources text automatically as a single file. Unfortunately we did not realize that this meant losing the ability to add notes, renderings, and interlinear info.

We are currently trying to figure out what if anything we should do in 8.1 to get some or all of this capability back.

Questions:

What do you think are the most common reasons why a team would want to add notes, renderings or interlinears to resource texts?

Do you think that most commonly people want to add this information just for themselves or would it be more common to want to share this added information with others?

Answer 1

anon451647,

If we could share notes and interlinear on resource texts via send/receive,
it would open up many possibilities for easily sharing information on
resource texts. I know consultant notes is available, but it would be very
helpful to be able to make and share notes about specific resource texts.

If we could share interlinear via send/receive, we could create easily
crowdsource share-able Greek- and Hebrew-to-LWC interlinears.

Biblical Terms Renderings: I spent quite a bit of time and effort
identifying Biblical Terms Renderings for some resource texts in English
and Tok Pisin over the course of several years. My purpose was to see how
various Biblical Terms were rendered in certain resource texts as an aid to
developing renderings for vernacular texts. I would view them in parallel
with the vernacular texts in the Biblical Terms tool via Comparative Texts.
This made comparing the renderings in the various texts practical.

I wanted to use this information in my own work, but I also wanted to share
this information with my teammates and others. This was impossible via
send/receive in Paratext 7.x but one could copy the Biblical Terms
Renderings file from one machine to another to at least get a snapshot of
this work at a specific point in time.

In Paratext 8 we can’t approve renderings for a resource text at all, which
is why you’re asking about it.

So I would love to see this functionality restored, and to be able to share
this data with my teammates and anybody else who wants it. At one time I
suggested via the PT Supporters list that we do this via crowdsourcing.
That suggestion did not go very far at the time, and at the time somebody
suggested that another UBS initiative related to resource texts would make
it obsolete and unnecessary.

I have approved renderings for each book as we translated them, but only on
the Biblical Terms that our team is tracking, which is a subset of Major
Biblical Terms. Recently a bug was fixed in Paratext 8 so that now it is
quite easy to approve renderings for multiple texts at the same time. It
really is not as much work as it sounds like, and if we had multiple people
working on it, I believe we could have excellent results fairly quickly. I
have done quite a bit of this for NIV84, TPBU99, ESV01, and NLT07 on about
1/3 of the NT. My work on this is not perfect, but I would be happy to
share it.

If it were possible to share this data via send/receive, I think a lot of
Paratext users could make good use of it. I think the usual "permissions"
would have to apply, i.e. you would have some people editing this
information and others only receiving updates and viewing it.

Thank you for asking about this!

john_nystrom

Comments

I would agree: especially for comparison of Biblical Terms used by standard resources like NIV, ESV and NLT, this would be really helpful. I think it used to be possible to edit that in PT7, and I miss it in PT8. NIV11 seems to come with a subset already in place, which is a start. But having the option for a more literal version like ESV would also be useful.

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I concur for slightly different reasons. We are looking forward to MARBLE, but…

1. Some of us OT guys have compiled lots of handy information IN RELATION TO THE HEBREW TEXT. In P8 you cannot show Consultant Notes on the BHS. YOU CAN CREATE THEM from the BHS, but it will not show them. So Consultant Notes leaves something to be desired in this respect.

2. Many of our resources are charts and pictures (which we may be able to import as a .png) into the text, but are those easily visible in the text for other translators? or does one need to do something “publishy” to get them to show?

3. Other resources are .ppts, .docx, .txt, etc. These are very hard to link to our study resources that we wish to make available to our consultants and translators. file:/// does not work in project notes for linking to local files. It would be great if we could drop some files in a project subfolder and put a link in the project notes.

4. Still other resources are native P8 .ref files, etc. There is no way to easily leave a .ref list for others to use. In one sense this could be done via biblical terms by creating a dummy key term and manipulating the .xml to include all the desired references. One obvious use of this is to create special semantic domain lists that defy the standard domains. This could be useful to allow one-off lists without necessitating changes to the general Biblical Terms semantic domain structure(s).

[I still advocate adding check boxes to lists so they can be used to track whether or not the references in the list have been acted upon in some way.]

Milt_Jones

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Milt_Jones, on point #1 I can both create and show Consultant notes from the Hebrew, both the HEB/GRK resource text and the source language window. Make sure that you have the consultant notes from that notes project set to visible under View, Show Consultant Notes

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Thanks dhigby, I will try again. Perhaps I need a reboot

Milt_Jones

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Ok, I just tested it with the latest update and the Consultant Notes is working fine.

Thanks,

Milt_Jones

Answer 2

FYI, notes from a P7 resource can be migrated to P8, by copying them first into a new P7 consultant notes project then migrating that project to P8.

Comments

Yes, since some of the needs anon451647 describes are met by the excellent Consultant Notes technology, I would encourage people to just use that more.

Answer 3

1. What do you think are the most common reasons why a team would want to add notes, renderings or interlinears to resource texts?

a. For translators (usually MTTs) who don’t understand English or any other major LWC, it is helpful to work with a regional resource text to identify the renderings used there. This tagged/marked up regional language text can then be put alongside the vernacular to help the translator understand what the term means.

b. To make notes in the resource text when problems/issues/errors are encountered - so that the owner of the text can be notified and subsequent improvements can be made.

2. Do you think that most commonly people want to add this information just for themselves or would it be more common to want to share this added information with others?

If all the effort involved in doing a. and b. above only benefits one person, then few people are likely to make the effort. But if they know that their effort will also benefit other team members, or better still anyone using that text as a resource, then they are far more likely to put in the effort needed.

[Another related thought:] This also may be a clever way of “crowd-sourcing” valuable data needed to make MARBLE successful for some of the lesser-known regional languages.

Answer 4

We would use the interlinear to help the translators get a basic understanding of the source text terms as a first step to drafting.

In Vanuatu we are trying to implement something like this with the project interlinearizer and a Hebrew and Greek source text. I don’t see why you couldn’t do the same thing using a popular LWC text though (if it were possible). Imagine how convenient it would be to have one vernacular input their interlinear for the source text and then later be able to share that interlinear with a related vernacular that is just getting started.

Being able to share notes and renderings on a resource text would be interesting, but I am not sure how that would work with multiple people and groups using the same texts. If there was a way to create a group that could share their own notes with each other, that would be really helpful.

Answer 5

As has been mentioned before by john_nystrom , ‘reverse-engineering’ resource texts to see the renderings they actually have used is quite instructive particularly for translators who have poor or no Biblical language skills. Otherwise, actually the biblical terms tool is rather difficult for some translators to use well, since relying on the English gloss is a really bad idea in many cases.

Answer 6

6 posts were split to a new topic: Request for a better List UI

Answer 7

Is the renderings for resources aspect being solved with the new 8.1 ‘Enhanced Resource’ feature?

Comments

rowbory:

Is the renderings for resources aspect being solved with the new 8.1 ‘Enhanced Resource’ feature?

No, sorry. Enhanced Resources are unrelated.
We didn’t get much feedback from the Survey of needs to edit PT8 resources so I’m not sure how high of a priority it is to get this functionality back (someone else will probably need to speak to the priority).

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Ah well. Maybe it’s just a minor pet interest. I think it’s rather helpful for translators and consultants (and both translators- and consultants-in-training) to be able to ‘reverse engineer’ and use the Biblical Terms tools to see how the reference/model versions they know handle biblical terms. For example, ESV for all its claims to essential literalism as a translation philosophy, bends that literalism in many cases. It’s interesting to observe that presbyteros etc becomes ‘elders’ and ‘older men/women’ depending on context because English divides things a little differently from Greek.

Anyway, I still think resource renderings are quite useful and I’ve done a fair bit of work in my Paratext 7.6 to collect renderings for the ESV, GNTUK, NIV84, NET and NLT96. It’s something that would best be done collaboratively, but it was difficult to do that in 7.6 and impossible now in 8.x.

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I too think that it would be useful to have this information for several important translations. It just depends on the copyright holder of the text. I have seen a couple of translations that had some renderings marked in the Biblical terms tool. The NIV11 had some for awhile but when an update to the text came through, the renderings went away. We need to ask the publishers to leave the “termsrenderings.xml” file with the text.