Best way for a user to contribute to a translation without being "seen" by other members of the translation team?

Question

We have a user who would like to work under a pseudonym on a project in Paratext. The Admin would also like to keep this user from seeing other members of the translation team.

For now, we have suggested they use an Auxiliary project, where the pseudonym user is the only user. I recommended they only work on books that others are done editing, or only insert notes for books that people are still editing.

I’m also not aware of a way, apart from Compare Versions, to track changes between the parent and auxiliary project.

Is this the best way to do this, or are there other suggestions? I believe that a daughter project could have the ability to track changes in the parent project (similar to the Back Translation status checkboxes), but don’t know if that would be the best suggestion in this scenario.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Funny, I’ve been brainstorming ideas for almost the exact same scenario recently and also came up with the Aux project idea.

In our case, the user we’ll have isolated will only be doing drafting, which makes things a little easier. The team both wanted to keep a number of different drafters from knowing about each other (which may end up with a couple Aux project).

A supervisor will then need to copy his work out of the Aux project and into the main one, which will require either using the Compare Versions tool as you suggested or just knowing where the drafting is happening and cutting/pasting.

One extra detail is that they wanted the Aux project to have access to Biblical Term rendering choices. So the ProjectBiblicalTerms.xml file will periodically need to be copied from the main project folder into the auxiliary one.

Anyway, I don’t have any ideas that you haven’t explored, but I’m also quite interested in hearing if other people have best practice ideas for this sort of situation.

Comments

mnjames:

A supervisor will then need to copy his work out of the Aux project and into the main one, which will require either using the Compare Versions tool as you suggested or just knowing where the drafting is happening and cutting/pasting.

You can use the project menu Manage Books | Copy Books to copy the new or updated Aux text to the main project. It shows (via book names in bold) which books are different between projects, so you can see which ones have been updated in the Aux project. (You can also right click on a book to get a Compare Versions dialog, however that dialog has problems and only shows the diffs for 1 chapter [PTXS-30060].)

Answer 2

I realized that if they wanted to see changes to the parent project, they would need to be a member of the parent project, and that would defeat the purpose of anonymity… Hmmm…

Comments

We have projects where all “translators” use pseudonym names, but not for consultants, and observers, etc.
However, if MTTs have access to registry.paratext.com they could still see each others emails, etc.
I suppose you could use generic emails for paratext registration.

Answer 3

If they all used pseudonym registration names and pseudonym registration emails (to prevent them from “seeing” others in the Registry, they could potentially all use the main project. But if adding “real name” consultants was a problem, that wouldn’t work.

Another option would be to use pseudonym registration names, but have the Administrator register them without an email address in the Registry. Then, I believe, they wouldn’t have access to the Registry. Or could they “complete” the registration of their own user in the Registry, and then see the others on the project?