What would you really like from the wordlist tool?

Question

Here’s your chance to shape how the wordlist tool works. Consider the following . . .

In Paratext, WordList has a Spelling column, which allows you to change the spelling status for a word, with “unknown”, “correct”, or “incorrect”.

Now when you click on incorrect, Paratext shows a dialog that allows you to change it, along with suggestions, then offers to perform a find/replace for all the words.

This click on ‘incorrect’ button adds a significant amount of development work. So the developement team is wondering what people would prefer from the wordlist tool.

Here are a few Options:

1. Don’t show the spelling column.
2. Show the spelling column in read only mode.
3. Allow changing, but don’t implement, the changing to incorrect extra functionality. (I don’t like this option - but listing it for completeness)
4. Implement it the same as Paratext.

Below is a screen shot of the under development wordlist.

Screenshot_2020-03-05-11-01-37800×1280 139 KB

Answer 1

If I could offer a fifth option, perhaps users could mark words as incorrect, offer their own suggestion for a correct spelling (with no help from PT Lite). Perhaps I’m voting for option number 3: show the spelling status, allow changing, allow [user-generated] suggestions, don’t enable automated global change suggestions and implementation.

It may prove difficult for some users to type in their diacritic characters on mobile devices, at which point having legitimate, program-generated alternate spellings would be helpful. But, in my opinion, the main functionality of the WL in PT lite will be for a reviewer (i.e., with no book permissions) to indicate changes that a translator should later implement.

As a bonus, if this limitation placed on the click on ‘incorrect’ button enables the the Find Similar Words and Find Incorrectly Joined and Split Words WL tools to be available in PT lite, that would be a huge asset to the wider translation team. Translators, reviewers, linguists, and consultants can do a lot of magic with those two tools to identify, pinpoint, and repair systemic orthographic inconsistencies. If you wanted to give a little more processing punch to PT Lite, it would be far more useful to have even a read-only version of those two tools than to have the full functionality of the click on ‘incorrect’ button.

I’m very excited that the WL (in any, even limited, form) may become available on PT Lite. Thanks for all your hard work!

Comments

Phil, thanks for your kind words of encouragement. Also, thank you for helping us understand how useful this could be. As developers we need all the help we can from the field to determine what to implement and how it should look. Thanks for the fifth option. Without having a discussion like this we would be limited to what we can dream up.

Lord bless you,
anon089134

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Phil, in terms of typing a language’s diacritics on a device, what about using https://keyman.com/

Answer 2

If I’m understanding you correctly, I would say that the spelling status column is actually very important to be able to identify the current status of that word. So, at the least it should be visible as a read only. Since my understanding of PT Lite is that it is “Lite” I don’t see a need to add the full PT Word List tool.

Comments

anon848905, thanks for your feedback. Sorry it took me so long to get back. I thought I had answered and have only just come back to this now.