Viewing recent changes to renderings

Question

I’m a translation consultant working with a translation project that has recently started using the Biblical Terms tool. I did a send/receive and noticed that one of the team members made changes to the renderings. Is there any way of telling what exactly was done? The recent changes dialog box only shows that changes were made to renderings without any indication as to what was done.

Answer 1

anon104217,
There is no way to track when a change to the Biblical terms rendering list was made. The SIL base plan references Biblical terms reports that list what Biblical terms have been changed and why, but I have not heard of plans of adding this kind of functionality to Paratext.
With some effort one could get records outside of Paratext. It is possible to export the Biblical terms renderings list as an html file and use that to make reports. If this were done on a regular basis, then one could compare the exported lists from various dates. Sorry there is not a more automated way to do what you to do.

Comments

anon044949,
Thanks for your suggestion. Adding the ability to see what Biblical Terms were edited recently would be a nice feature to add to Paratext.
anon104217

Answer 2

Hi anon104217,

We’ve been in the process of cleaning up keyterms recently, too. A couple of things that I’ve found helpful in keeping track of changed renderings are:

• Clicking on “Project > Project history …” will bring up a report similar to the one you refer to after doing a send/receive. In this tool, though, you can filter the change history in various ways. You can filter it to show history points that include “Changes to Renderings” (or even just scan down the list for rendering changes), then click on the down-arrow to expand the descriptions of the changes made at that history point. Although, as you mention, it doesn’t indicate which renderings were specifically modified, I’ve found that many times that a keyterm rendering is changed, text where it appears is changed at the same time. So the book/chapter references that appear in the same history point as the indication of a rendering change is a good place to start.
• Also remember that you can access a history of each term’s renderings. If you find a specific term that you suspect has changed, go to its “Edit Rendering” form (Tools > Biblical Terms … > Double-click on the rendering column for the term), then look for the “History” button to the right of the Renderings pane. I’ve found that a majority of rending changes that get recorded there are spelling changes, but I do encourage our team to make a note describing the reason for a change when it is more significant.

I hope one of these suggestions helps a little bit.

Comments

anon104217,

Thank you for sharing about the History button in the Biblical Terms tool. As you say, if you suspect a term has changed you can go to that term and click on the History button. It is even more powerful if the team has been trained to enter the reason for the change.

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As you see in my example of Pilate, no reason was given for the change, but it appears to be a spelling issue.

If we had a tool to extract this information into a single human-readable report, it would be great.

anon044949