How to create extra "Extra" books

Question

Like everyone else, we use Paratext for our Bible translation work, but unlike many Paratext users my wife and I and our Chadian coworkers find ourselves producing a fair bit of extra-biblical material for a vernacular Bible school. The vocabulary, usages, and expressions from the extra-Biblical material does much to enrich our Scripture translation work and vise-versa. We would really like to keep our entire corpus of materials under one roof. That was possible years ago with the SIL/Fieldworks Bible editor, but it is only somewhat possible with the 6 “Extra” books which Paratext allows. We have to cycle the most recent 6 books through XXA-XXF and put the older material out to pasture, where it no longer shows up in the Word List tool and where it’s spelling gets outdated over time. Is there any way, or can a way be made, so that we can make extra “Extra” books in Paratext? It would really be helpful.

Answer 1

Mark,

If you want to work with a growing corpus, then the best way to do it with the tools we currently have, is to link Paratext to Field works. Field works can import all of the Scripture you have and it updates it’s copy of the Scripture files each time it is open. You can have virtual unlimited number of other texts in Field works. Fieldworks automatically keeps a concordance of all the words in your corpus. You would have to teach Fieldworks everything you learned about correct spelling in Paratext, but there are some bulk editing tools to make this go faster. For example if you only import Scripture that you know is spelled correctly, then in Fieldworks you mark all of those words as being spelled correctly. Over time the amount of integration between Paratext and Fieldworks is slowly being increased. I wish that it would be given more priority. The potential for very powerful linguistic analysis and the study of key terms is there but need more development to make it faster and easier. If more people ask for these capabilities then they would be given a higher priority against all of the other requested changes.

I have written a tutorial on using Paratext and Flex together: https://lingtran.net/ParaTExt-FLEx+Integration+Tutorial
If this looks interesting to you and I can help you more, write to me off list. If you want to discuss the pros and cons of this approach, then you could start a new thread on this forum and see what others are doing with Flex.

Comments

anon044949:

If this looks interesting to you and I can help you more, write to me off list. If you want to discuss the pros and cons of this approach, then you could start a new thread on this forum and see what others are doing with Flex.

Yes, that definitely warrants discussion. In the past we had tried linking PT7 with Flex and had bitter disappointment because of technical issues*. So we have a policy to not link. And we are loosing out some nifty features. So if there was technical progress and PT8 can handle a dynamically evolving Flex project , we are willing to re-consider.

*(one aspect is that once or twice per year, on major milestones or because of major trouble, the Flex project gets renamed and fresh-synched on several machines)

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Thanks much anon044949 for pointing me to your write-up. It is well done and very interesting. Most of it I was aware of, but not the bit about Flex automatically updating from Paratext. On the balance, if it were Paratext looking at Flex’s checksums and automatically updating its files, then we might be onto something. However, no matter how you slice it, you still end up with the very unsatisfying arrangement of having two lexicons, two spelling dictionaries, two word lists, and ultimately two divergent evolutions of spelling conventions etc. Right now we have almost but not quite completely ditched Flex and find ourselves trying to do in Paratext what we ought to do in Flex – everything sort of writing actual definitions for word forms and morphemes. The very considerable work I put into modelling the language in the Flex parser years ago has proven a waste of time. How I wish it were otherwise. The shortest and easiest solution is still for Paratext to somehow allow us many more “extra” books.

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@mvk1000 It is in the long term plan that Paratext and Fieldworks would not just be linked but share one integrated lexical tool. Then all work on morphology and spelling would only have to be done once. The integrated lexical tool would also make working on large glossaries much easier since Fieldworks is a highly developed dictionary making program.

The problem is that funds and personnel are limited and software development is prioritized based on input from various places. I promote Paratext and Fieldworks integration when I can. I am told that making the integrated lexical tool is a very large project. If you would like to see the integrated lexical tool sooner, then you can go to the help menu in Paratext and click on “Make a suggestion” to get your needs on the list. User requests help move projects up the priority list. Also, pray for more programmers and more funds to add all the various features in Paratext, Fieldworks etc, that are being requested.

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I too wish for more “Extra books”, presently we are able to get 7 extra books. If we get more extra books it would really be helpful.

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It’s not ideal, but you can swap the Extra books in and out if necessary. If you go to Project menu, point to Advanced, and select Bible module, there is a drop-down list of all the modules you have created. That list can be as long as you want; it’s just that you can only have 7 of them active in the project at any given time.

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The whole point of not swapping books out is so that 1) the spelling conventions of all the books evolve simultaneously and 2) to be able to see/concord usages and vocabulary from all the books, and not just a subset of them in the word list. For a project like ours with lots a extra-biblical training materials, as well as the sacred text that is important. The SIL translators edition of field works could do this and much more besides. It was a pity it was terminated. To add some more extra books to PT would seem to be a very modest concession by the PT development team after something like 15 years of minimal progress towards the kind of integration with Field Works that they promised us at one time, and now don’t talk about any more. Mark V’kooi

Answer 2

I have requested this feature before, so I hope it’s being considered. It’s good to know that someone else wants this too. How about XXA-XXZ, or even 000-999? I have also requested the ability to give user the ability to give names to these extra books, which would appear in the dropdown book name list.
RickNivens

Answer 3

We would love the power of PT to translate extra stuff like “Where there is no doctor”, where each detail (names of medication) also matters as in “life or death”.

We are using OmegaT for now, but would appreciate a “free version” of PT, where projects could benefit from the tools and Word Lists and Key Terms, and from the inbuilt love and competence for minority languages. So our idea would be like two semi-detached houses, sharing one roof, as we see a lot in the UK.

This forum-tool allows voting/polling, so we could ask if more users would like this and how much each project would pay (yes, money) to maybe hire some bright post-grads to make it happen. I propose the name PPT: ParaParaText…

Comments

I too thought of the elegance that a second stripped-down “para Paratext” could offer. Such an approach would keep the real PT lean and mean.

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mvk1000:

stripped-down

May it never happen. We have plenty lean and mean in this part of Africa. We want “fat and juicy” please.

So in a ParaParaText there would not be any of the scripture ressources, and therefore hopefully more legal freedom to work on “other” materials.

But all the tools should be exactly the same, even the menus and the project options etc. so that we can translate other good stuff without getting migranes from the “differences” between PT and PPT (which would be “Para”, when literally doing the difference). A user should almost not notice any difference, maybe a hint of colour could be used to indicate whether one is in PT or PPT.

(I sometimes get lost in Flex between Lexicon and Text and Words because all those lists look rather similar at first glance, and I wish for a colour-coding for many years.)

In case some PT developers are following here: We love PT! We are just messing about, creating vision. That is our job as users and supporters: cry for more features all the time. So please see it as our compliments to your competences, not as criticism for the existing “Classic PT”.

Answer 4

I too wish for more “Extra Books”. (And I kind of wish they weren’t using the “XX” designation, but whatever.) And I very much like the idea of giving them REAL NAMES. Even with only 5 used XX books, I often can’t remember in which book I put what! So I’m having to click hither and yon to find stuff. >>“Booknames” would help tremendously.<<

But the main difficulty with adapting “extra” materials (liturgy, glossary, how to read the Bible, etc.) into the Paratext paradigm is that Paratext is set up assuming everything is marked up with \v markers for small chunks, and \c for big chunks. So, to get the glossary to work in a somewhat helpful way, I have to give arbitrary verse numbers to each entry–skip by 10s, so new words can be added in between–and chapters mark letter sections. This is the ONLY way I have found to keep our Notes from jumping to the top of the chapter whenever we significantly edit marked text. And without \v markers, PT8 isn’t able to scroll “Compare Text” or related project windows together. The version control system also assumes a \v marks minimal chunks (so if two users edit different verses, there is no conflict). But in the Extra materials with no verse markings, it is very easy to get edit conflicts.

All that to say, Extra Books are extremely useful. We need more of them. And we need a way to name them. But they feel like a kludge, and it would be helpful if PT8 would recognized NON-Scripture text as being demarcated by paragraph markings. E.g. when no \v markers are in the text, use the \p (etc.) markers to delineate it. But I suspect such a fundamental change to PT8 might require a complete rewrite! So, I’m thankful for what we got. In case you were wondering…

Comments

@anon571585 You might be interested in this Glossary Best Practices other thread, where people are discussing on how best to use the glossary.

Ideas are being raised on how to apply more helpful structure to long glossaries. So you could share your ideas and needs. And maybe both issues can make a stronger entry on the road map as a feature request.

Answer 5

I have a suggestion for those wanted to use Paratext for massive amounts of extra Biblical material. It has its limitations but some might find it useful. The xml files containing the wordlist, biblical terms and interlinear glosses can be copied and imported into Paratext on another computer. So, install Paratext on a different computer and copy all these files from the translation computer and put them in the proper directories on the new computer. Then you can use this Paratext to translated Where there is No Doctor, Pilgrim’s progress or whatever. You can put where there is no doctor in Matthew, and Pilgrim’s Progress in Mark and so forth. Actually you could copy these files over to new project on the same computer, and that would work too. I have done this with about thirty texts that I have collected. It was faster to check the spelling and gloss these stories this way than in Flex since I already had already spell checked and glossed most of the Bible in Paratext. I then could copy cleaner texts into Flex for more detailed analysis.

Comments

I love it. Especially the

anon044949:

I have done this

Such testimony gives courage to spend time and have a go at such “hacking for a good cause”.

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I don’t think anon044949’s idea will scratch where I itch. What I need is for the Word List tool to deliver me a concordance of ALL the usages of both the Biblical and extra-Biblical material, whether I happen to be working on Hebrews or on a discipleship course for the Bible school. Also, I need the spelling conventions to evolve across the totality of the corpus, so that when “tana” evolves to “tanah”, all the occurrences are changed. Of course that can’t happen with two projects or two computers. It sounds like in anon044949’s case the Biblical corpus is a done deal and the spelling conventions are no longer fluid which is a different kettle of fish.

Right now, if the developers are interested in pursuing this, the path of least resistance is to just add more XX books. I will say however, that my original suspicion was that someplace in the bowels of PT there was an XML file with list of all the possible books in it that I could modify to both add additional books and edit to make more intelligible names for the XX books. Alas, it seems that that information is hard-coded. Having said that, maybe another way to skin the cat without making too much headache for the developers would be to move that information to a suitably obscure XML file? You would think that shouldn’t be too hard.