7.6 Beta Biblical Terms Tool functionality

Question

Feature love: I love the ability to add a project note from the Biblical Terms Tool. However, what I thought might be an issue is becoming one in actuality.

Frustration: The team I am working on has multiple people creating project notes (not uncommon in Seed Company and SIL since advisers and consultants come and go, furlough, ask for someone else to temporarily cover a project for them, etc.)

If an adviser or consultant is working from the Biblical Terms tool, they will generally not see the notes someone else (or they themselves) have made. I am now beginning to see multiple notes essentially saying the same thing. Sometimes one note is from a previous consultant who noticed an issue a year or two ago, and the ‘repeat note’ is from another person (me!) working from the Biblical Terms tool and not realizing the same idea has already been captured in a note. Sometimes two similar notes can be created just a few days apart by the same person when working through name dense texts, e.g. Table of Nations, geneaologies, etc.

Example: Right now I am trying to clean up 1 Chron 1-9, Gen 1 and in some cases the geneaologies in the Gospels. So the tool is very helpful and yet fairly frustrating since as a consultant and not a translator I cannot simply edit the text. I must leave notes. For some teams the notes might be able to reside in the Biblical Terms tools (though we generally only use those discussion notes for discussing the merits of a certain rendering and not telling the team ‘change this word at this location’). For the most part, once a rendering/spelling has been established for a name, then we put a project note at the 3-4 places that do not conform, because the team generally works through the text (not the Bib Terms tool) solving the various kinds of problems from project notes.

Additional weakness: (Even when working through the Biblical Terms tool, probably 10-20% of decisions cannot be properly made from that tool because it shows a single verse of text. Many times pronouns correctly refer back a verse or two, but this cannot be shown without going back to the main window.)

Suggestion: What would seem most helpful would be to show the project note tags in the Bib Term text boxes and allow a hover or open note to show the content of a tag. That way someone creating project notes in the Bib Terms tool would know if a similar note had already been created.

Another frustration: For those who work predominantly from the Bib Terms rendering window, if I am viewing a term say ‘Issakar’ and I realize that it should always be rendered as ‘Isakar’ - I cannot easily move to a quick way of viewing and editing all occurrences of the term. Some people would recommend using the Spelling tool, but I find the full Bib Terms tool is much better for finding missing renderings (besides the spelling tool not having an easy time finding all misspellings such as ‘Yissikar’). So it seems that the rendering window could benefit from having a way to jump to the full Bib Terms tools where all occurrence (or missing renderings) could be worked without losing the term and having to search for it all over again.

Answer 1

While you are right that it can be difficult to track down all the
misspelling options for a term in the spelling tool, it is very important
to use it to make the corrections. Three things are possible this way:

1.  Misspellings are corrected in places that the Biblical Terms Tool
   

is not aware of like section titles, footnotes, intros, pictures, the
glossary, and perhaps a nearby verse.

2.  The misspelling is marked wrong for the future so that there is no
   

more confusion about it.

3.  It is much faster to effect the spelling change here than in the
   

Biblical Terms Tool and much safer than in the Find/Replace Tool.

One way to find the alternate misspellings in the Spelling Tool is to paste
the word in the find box and then delete the letters off the end (or
beginning depending upon your morphology) one by one.

I do agree with you that it would be nice for some integration between the
two tools since I find the above strategy difficult to teach to some teams.

Blessings,

Shegnada J.

Language Tecnology and Publishing Coordnator, Nigeria

Text Processing Specialist GPS Dallas

Skype: Shegnada.James.

+[Phone Removed]

Answer 2

Yes, I can see that there is nothing to keep a team from making project notes and Biblical terms rendering notes on the same topic. The two types of notes are not visible at the same time. I would echo Shegnada’s comments that it is best practice to have consistent spelling before using the Biblical terms tool. If there is disagreement on transliterated names, I would suggest that those be documented in the Biblical terms Tool and that the Biblical terms tool would be used as a guide to discussions about borrowed names. Ideally, there would be a policy set forth in the orthography statement about how names should be transliterated and this guide the translators from the beginning and every proper name would not have to be debated.