What about the \w .. \w* that were missed?

Question

L.S.
After completing the glossary and automatically adding the \w \w* in the the text, it has come to my attention that there are qui a few of \w \w* that were missed, meaning not put in the text where one would expect them to be. These are the occurrences that were made explicit in the translation. Here is an example:

(NIV) Matthew 24.17 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesnʼt your teacher pay the temple tax?”

The word temple is not in the greek but was made explicit by the translators. From the point of view of the reader, a \w \w* would be nice to have here, but this cannot be achieved by the “Mark occurences of selected terms as glossary items” in the Biblical Terms module.

My question is, is there a way to find the words that were ‘missed’ by the “Mark occurrences of selected terms as glossary items”?

If there is not, can I conclude that the “Mark occurences of selected terms as glossary items” is really only usefull for literal translations, and dynamic translations, like the NIV, are better of putting the \w \w* in manually ?

Thanks in advance for your help,
goodgoan

Answer 1

The add \w …\w is designed to only mark glossary word occurrences in verses where they occur in the original language source text. The “advantage” to this is if you have two words that translate the same original language term, they will point to the same glossary entry. If that happens, I expect you would explain why more than one word in the target language was used to translate the same source language word. After all glossary entries are generally key terms, and you should translate key terms consistently.

So you are right, the tool works best and is intended for translations where glossary words are strongly correlated to the original language. Is that a problem? I would think not. A dynamic translation will generally translate in a way that does not require a Glossary. Generally more literal translations are used for serious Bible study where readers actually take the time to look up words in a glossary. Of course if there is only one translation in a language you may want to put everything in one package…

Regarding your example
I would not expect temple to be marked in your example above. Rather, in your example from MAT 17:24, two-drachma temple tax should be marked. It is a translation of δίδραχμον — two-drachma piece; temple tax — the tax required of every male Jew from the age of twenty onward; to support the temple.
You simply need to add δίδραχμον as an entry to your Glossary and then in your entry you can also direct people to temple.

Comments

Thanks CrazyRocky,
For the temple tax, that is the solution here, but for all the other “missed” glossery items I see no other option besides manual checks. Also in the App, I would want to include all the missed words because they become clickable.
goodgoan.

PS. You said : “The add \w …\w is designed to only mark glossary word occurrences in verses where they occur in the original language source text.”

That is indeed what I (finally) discovered, and it took me a while to find out. It would be good to add in the user manual, or the accompanying video tutorials a “watch out” message indicating just that, because my guess is that 90% of users would expect the word in question to get \w \w* added in all cases, not just where the source text has it.