Bulk marking incorrect spellings

Question

Hi, I have a question about bulk marking words as incorrect in the wordlist. We are in final NT checks and have just altered two orthography rules. I would like to bulk mark certain words as incorrect because of one of the rules, but not specify the correct spelling because of the second rule - that one requires me to be able to discuss the spelling with a native speaker. If I can at least mark them as incorrect the red squiggly line would prompt the translator to check the spelling without me having to bring each word to his attention individually.

I’m using Paratext 9.1, and for a single word I can simply click the red cross and then choose cancel. The word gets marked as incorrect but nothing else as been set as correct.

I can’t seem to do this in bulk. When I filter the wordlist to get the words I am interested in, select all the words and use the ‘set spelling status - incorrect’ tool, the window to choose/set the correct spelling opens, and looks exactly the same as the window that opens when I just click the red cross for an individual word. However, when I click cancel, that dialogue box just closes without changing anything. I would expect to have to click cancel multiple times as the dialogue cycles through all of the words that were selected (unless a ‘cancel all’ feature were added), so still doing part of the job one-by-one, but at least that would be quicker than selecting each word individually.

Is this a bug, or am I missing something in the process? Or if this is the way it is intended to behave because no one has asked to make the bulk process a possibility then this is now a request to make it possible!

Thanks,
Lizzie

Answer 1

Like anon848905 says, if you want to mark them as incorrect you need to supply the correct spelling. If you mark them as unknown then they will still get a gray squiggly line. Would that be enough?

If not and if you can use regular expressions to find the words, regular expressions can be used to modify the project’s SpellingStatus.xml file to bulk mark them incorrect. For example, you would change:

<Status Word="akafiké" State="R" />

to

<Status Word="akafiké" State="W" />

If you are able to use regular expressions to correct the spellings, then you can also include the correction:

<Status Word="akafiké" State="W">
    <Correction>^akafike</Correction>
</Status>

You may need an experienced technician to do this for you.

Answer 2

It does seem that this is not working as the guide suggests.
If I select multiple words in the wordlist, and use the menu to “Set spelling status - incorrect”, I get the window that allows for typing the correct spelling. The guide below the window says “Enter correct spelling or click Cancel to only mark as incorrect.”. But clicking cancel does not mark any of the words incorrect, and instead cancels the entire procedure. Ideally we would have the ability to mark words as incorrect in bulk without choosing a correct spelling, but also have a way to cancel the operation completely.

Answer 3

The behavior you describe is the default behavior. You can bulk approve spellings and you can bulk mark words as unknown, but since marking a word as incorrect normally requires indicating what the correct spelling should be, it is not possible currently to bulk mark words as incorrect.

At this time the fastest way to do this is to click the X and then cancel.

If you wish to submit a feature request, it should be done through the Help > Give feedback feature of Paratext.

Comments

Thanks everyone. I will submit a feature request and we’ll see where it goes! May be too late for me by then, but hopefully it will help someone else.

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I am wondering why you have so many words that you are sure are wrong. Have you had an orthography change? Depending on the cause of this issue in your particular case, it might be more efficacious to use the character inventory and character check to teach Paratext that all words with certain characters are wrong. Just a thought for your consideration.

Answer 4

Yes, we’ve had an orthography change but no graphemes have changed. We are changing a tone marking rule, and also another rule about how vowels are written in specific contexts.

The tone rule means words that have been written
akafiké
will now be written
^akafike
and those written
akafíke
will be written without any mark
akafike

If it were just that issue I would be able to set the correct spellings. However, because of the vowel rule change there are also places where just changing the tone marking will not be enough, and I can’t enter the correct spelling myself. If I can at least mark them as incorrect the translator will be prompted to check the spelling himself whenever he sees the squiggly red line.

Comments

Thank you for the explanation. I had two additional thoughts. The first is to set the spelling status of all the words in the wordlist back to “unknown” spelling status and starting over with spell checking. The other is to use regexpal to find and fix the words with a tone marking change.

Answer 5

Thanks, I’ve already done both of those things, but since Paratext ‘remembers’ the status of words which have been in the project in the past, I still want to mark the old spellings as incorrect. Then if someone writes them according to the old rule any time again in the future (the old rule has been in place for a number of years so I expect it will take a while for the change to come naturally) they will still get flagged as incorrect and give the translator a prompt to check what he’s written.

Comments

You could consider adding rules to AutoCorrect.txt so that when a translator types the old spelling it is automatically changed to the new spelling.

Answer 6

I believe they only get a grey squiggly line once enough words have been marked as either incorrect or correct, don’t they? Which won’t work for the moment since I had to mark all as incorrect at the beginning of the process (not just because of this orthography change but because of the way the wordlist tool had been used in the past the spelling status didn’t actually mean anything, for example translators correcting words in the wordlist but not taking into account that the word they marked incorrect was only incorrect in that context). At some point that will kick in I guess.

Adding to the autocorrect won’t work because it would require an infinite number of words!

I probably could do the spelling status in the xml file, but it would be much easier if the ability to do this in the wordlist could be added, so I’ve submitted a feature request. Especially since as Stephen+Katt said in the very first reply, the dialogue does imply that this is possible. If it’s not intended ot be possible and the decision remains to not make it possible, then the wording of the guide should probably be updated to reflect that.