Is it possible to limit the books a person can make a notes in

Question

I was asked if it is possible to limit the books that a person is able to make notes in. The person has had a problem where another person was making to many notes, and notes in books that they should not have been commenting. Is there a way to limit the scope of where the consultant role can make notes?

Answer 1

But you can create a seperate project and ask the consultant to make their remarks there. In fact, since most of the time a consultant will not know the language he / she is checking, it makes more sense to ask the consultant to make notes in the backtranslation project. If you want to keep your project clean, I would either ask the C to make notes in the backtranslation project or create a daughter project used for checking only.

Comments

I’ve never heard of a consultant putting their notes in a back translation project. At typesetting time, I want to know that all consultant notes are resolved before I will typeset and you alarm me if they are being put in a different project than the translation itself. If a consultant were to use a different project than the translation itself, they will need to make sure themselves that those responsible for signing off on the publication are aware that the consultant notes are elsewhere or the job could be published without it being released properly. And now I’ll have to specifically ask each project where their consultant notes are.

You could ask the consultant to make notes to himself in a separate project and keep only real consultant notes in the translation project. It seems a very odd request to me unless somehow the consultant notes were irrelevant.

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I just talked to a
translation consultant (whom I know well). She says that she
puts consultant notes in the back translation if it’s a project
in a script she can’t read. When everything is resolved she
writes a consultant report. The team will need to make these
consultant reports available to the publisher, so presumably
they could also be available for the typesetter.

PADev.

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I am also a consultant who generally writes my notes in the back translation unless the translation team asks me to put the notes in another place. I do not write up my report until I see that everything has been resolved. Then I provide the report to that team as well as their administration.

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Hello Shegnada,
How wonderfully different workflow can be from one country to the next. in 95% of cases I know about the consultant does not know the language he/she is checking. Thus they work with the backtranslation and in all the cases I know about prepares his/her questions in that backtranslation project. Only the exceptionally gifted consultants who know a language in the language family could make sens of the text they are checking and sometimes request access to the target language projet. . . . And quite frankly, this way of working keeps the translation project remarks scope to the team itself . . . (until typesetting that is).

Answer 2

No you can’t limit which books someone can write notes in.

Comments

But what about the elephant in the room this question brings up: Maybe it SHOULD be possible to lock books so that only people with permission can actually write notes in a book.

(Yes, I know each users’ notes are kept in a separate HTML file in each project folder and the various comments are tracked with GUIDs. So I suspect adding a lock to a book for a particular user might be very complicated with this kind of implementation. But that doesn’t address the “use-case” where it would be nice to stop people from commenting on books they have not business making notes in.)

So the answer is “No, you can’t.” but might it not be a feature people would find useful and possibly worth implementing?

Answer 3

Thank you all for replies, I did not think it was possible, but wanted to make sure. As the consultant is outside of my particular organization, I’m not aware how familiar that individual is with what is possible in Paratext (ie Consultant notes project). I’ll pass that suggestion on.