Best practice: writing Notes for future books (ones not started yet)

Question

[Also posted to PT-Supporters; I’d prefer replies here.]

A few months ago, the manager of our translation team, a local SIL affiliate, decided that he should create all the books that we hadn’t started work on. Where we are translating the NT and the NT was quoting the OT, the foreign exegetes in our project wanted to be able to write Notes on the OT verses for future reference when we come to translate those books. They couldn’t do this if the book had not been created. So the decision was to simply create every canonical book.

I wasn’t very happy with this decision, because it’s nice when the existence of a book shows that the book is being worked on. It was by far the quickest way to know how many books were either completed or underway (we don’t yet user the Project Progress functionality, though I plan to learn this soon, and train the team in it).

So, does anyone know a better solution to our problem of writing Notes for books we aren’t yet working on translating? I guess I could manually edit each exegete’s Comments file, and then the Notes would appear once the book gets created, but that’s not an elegant solution .

Answer 1

I don’t have personal wxperience with it, but it seems like a consultant note project could do the job:

Here’s a quote from the PT help file on what is possible:

For example:

• A consultant can insert notes in a personal project which represents a checklist for consulting with translators. If you rarely add a second comment to a note: from the View menu, click to clear the tick by Edit Notes in the Notes List window.
• Several consultants can have roles on a project for discussions in which they insert notes to ask for advice and add comments to make suggestions.
• Several translators and consultants can have roles on a project for discussions which affect an entire cluster of related languages (for example, to reach a consensus about biblical terms). Because you cannot resolve a consultant note, you might select a different tag for a note to indicate a completed discussion when you add a final comment to summarize a decision.

You can insert a consultant note when a project or resource text is active (from the Insert menu, select Consultant Note). Type your comment in the Note editing window, and then select which consultant notes project.

Here’s a quote on what’s not possible:

A consultant note is similar to a project note, but you cannot resolve it or assign it. The default icon for a Consultant note is a blue plus.
A Consultant Notes project differs from all other types of projects because it contains only consultant notes and does not contain any biblical books or text with USFMs.
A Consultant Notes project is NOT intended for a note from a consultant to a translator about a particular translation project (which can be assigned to the translator), but instead for notes which are relevant for multiple translation projects.

Answer 2

Yes, a consultants note project would allow you to make notes on a missing book, chapter, verse (BCV). You would need to go to that BCV in some other text and add a consultant note. However, there is no way to automatically convert a consultant’s not to a project note. As already mentioned there is no way to resolve a consultants note either, so you will have no way to track if the team has dealt with the issue. You could manually copy the text of a consultants note into a project note once the missing book has been created, but depending on how many notes you wish to copy, that could be a lot of work.

Answer 3

Looks like this could be a problem in need of a solution!

Answer 4

Just a mild change of subject as a possible consolation:

We recently discovered that biblical key terms do not show (get filtered by PT without mention) for books not yet created. So when dealing with new key terms and trying to make the best possible local words, it helps to see all occurrences in scripture and the respective contexts. I recently mass-created all books and have not regretted it so far.