Should Paratext be used for tracking oral translation projects?

Question

I’m not familiar with the software tools for oral translation, but for a fully oral project does it make sense to record progress in a shell Paratext project so that the status can be viewed by adminstrators in the PT registry? Any thoughts/advice appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi, anon989803. My wife happens to be in an oral Bible translation workshop right now, so I forwarded your question to that group, which includes several people who are up to speed on the OBT movement. One of the workshop leaders in turn sent your question to other key people. After receiving some responses, he concluded, “From what I could tell nobody is doing real-time tracking for OBT projects. Paratext could definitely be used in this way. Transcriber would be an efficient tool for capturing the audio and putting it into Paratext.”

Someone else replied: “We do not currently have real-time tracking with Progress.Bible, but rather send a quarterly report . . . . We have talked about building an API for them but I don’t think we will until we update and advance our own database (on the roadmap but nothing imminent). We have a number of OBT projects using Paratext… however, I don’t believe progress is recorded there.”

I’ll be happy to try to put you in touch with these folks if you want to contact me in a private message.

Answer 2

anon989803, we use Paratext for our Oral Translation because back when we started our consultants wanted a written version of the material since none of them had worked with an oral translation before. So we also use it to for them, and since then to track progress. However we do not do it in real time, more like a day or two later when we get around to typing it up.

Answer 3

Thanks for the info and research!

Answer 4

I was asked in a PM about Transcriber. Here’s a description provided by an OBT specialist:

Transcriber is used by many teams doing oral drafting, oral storying and oral translation. It exports your transcription directly into Paratext. It is in active development by SIL’s LSDev department and will continue to see new features added in the coming months and years. More info can be found at: https://software.sil.org/siltranscriber/.