Is there a way to sort projects and resources by language?

Question

In Paratext, I have several projects and resources selected in the dropdown box (next to the controls for selecting the book, chapter and verse). I have at least five languages represented in that list. When I want to find the translation that I’m looking for, it always takes a while, for two reasons:

• The resources and projects aren’t sorted by language. It would be helpful if they were grouped by language (like using the <optgroup> control in an HTML <select> box), like in this screenshot:
  

• The names of the translations aren’t always the ones that I would expect, and are often in English rather than the language of the translation. For example, “ONAV - Biblica Ⓡ Open New Arabic Version 2012” is known under the different name كتاب الحياة in Arabic, which means “Book of Life”. The translation “GNA - Arabic: Good News Arabic 1993” is known as الترجمة العربية المشتركة in Arabic, which means “the Arabic translation in common”. This naming scheme makes it harder to find Arabic translations in the sea of translations with English names, which is why grouping them would make things easier.

Answer 1

There are a number of ways to get what you want.

Firstly, in the Open Project/Resource menu, you can sort by language. There is both a column and a filter for language. This won’t work very well, however, unless your teams have properly chosen their language. I highly recommend getting that fixed right away if it is a problem. Also, it would not include back translations for a language project since those would be in a major language presumably. So there are two other ways which are very helpful…

Secondly, in the very same menu you can choose a set of projects and save the selection. Choose multiple projects that you want to open as a set by holding down the ctrl key while selecting. Then name them in the “saved selections” window and click the save icon. This set of projects will then open all together whenever you choose that selection. If you look for it, this selection will then be available wherever you are able to select texts. In this same window, you can choose to open them all as a Text collection, for example. In the example below, I am opening the five MLT language projects as a Text Collection.

Thirdly, you can save layouts. Open the projects that you want to work on together, set them up just the way you want them, and then go to the Main Paratext menu and choose Save Current Layout under the Layout column. Whenever you choose it in the future, all the windows will open exactly the way you have saved it now.

Blessings,

Comments

That’s helpful, Shegnada, thank you.

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It is recommended that short names of active translation projects contain the three letter iso/ethnologue code. This helps identify them in the Send/Receive server and later the DBL. It is not a bad thing for a translation team to learn the ethnologue code for their language. Many resources on the Internet also use these iso/ethnologue codes, so if you wanted to search for information about a language, it is worth doing a search on the iso code. Some projects add to the iso code to make the short name more meaningful. For example, if the iso code is xyz and the team is planning to only do the New Testament, then they name their project XYZNT. Sometimes a year is appended to the iso code that corresponds to the date the project will finish. In a case like this if a team plans to finish in 2026, then they would make the short name XYZ2026. If you have a back translation project, then naming it XYZ-BT will cause it to be recognizable and sort together with the translation project in lists. Paratext has a Convert tool that can be used to rename a project. I have helped several teams change the short name of their projects when they were ready to upload the project to the DBL. I would highly encourage you to somehow incorporate the iso/ethnologue code for your language in the short name. It will help you avoid some problems down the road, and once you all learn the iso code then you will easily recognize files and documents related to your language and project.

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I think that’s good advice regarding choosing a name of the project that is under one’s control. Thank you.

The topic I’m asking about is whether there is a way to make the project/resource dropdown control easier to use. I don’t think I can change the short name of other projects or resources, and most of them don’t have the language code at the beginning of the short name. If they did, it would be easier to find the project or resource that I’m looking for (when I’m using the dropdown control), as they would group together by language naturally. I wanted to bring this to people’s attention, in case there is a solution that I’m missing. I also hope this feedback is valuable because it is an issue that could escape English-speakers’ notice, since the short names KJV, NIV etc are intuitive in English, but the resources in other languages do not have intuitive short names (they’re without a language code and they do not match the name or the pronunciation of the translation name as it is commonly known).

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If you are able, it would probably help to report these issues using the Paratext menu > Help > Give feedback > Report a problem with resource content. That way they are officially “in the system”.

Answer 2

Everywhere in the Paratext UI, projects are displayed as their shortname. That is the reason projects are sorted by shortname in the list.

Comments

Thanks. It’s good to know the reasoning behind the UI.

To me, the short names don’t mean much to me. The translation that I know as كتاب الحياة (transliterated “Kitab Alhayat”) has the short name NAV, which doesn’t mean anything to me. And same for many other translations. In English, of course I’m very used to the abbreviations (KJV, NIV, ESV, etc), but in Arabic these short names stand for the English names of the translations, which often don’t match the meaning in Arabic or the transliteration. The project I’m working on has a short name that doesn’t stand for anything, it’s just a three letter abbreviation chosen sequentially to represent a dialect in a region, like counting using letters instead of numbers.