Sometimes projects only want to translate part of a book or translate chapters out of order. Teams have good reasons for doing these things, but it requires extra effort to use a project plan in these cases. Beyond this, if a team wants to only translate part of a book, then the project plan will block the team from going on to the next book. The solution is to define translation priorities for your project plan.
To more easily understand this method, I will start with some general information about priorities.
Note: Usually, translation priorities are referred to as just “priorities” in Paratext so the various tabs and dialogues are easier to read.
What are Translation Priorities in Paratext?
Translation priorities are sets of user-defined books and/or chapters that allow a team to implement their translation priorities. Just as book names are used to select books (#1 below), these sets of priorities can be used in the project plan, in the assignment of tasks, and in many other places to select the books/chapters specific to that priority (#2 below):
To make selecting priorities more user-friendly, the sets can be given meaningful names such as Synoptics, Pentateuch or Pastoral Epistles (see above).
When you use priorities in Assignments and Progress, Paratext only shows tasks/checks for the currently selected priority or priorities:
Translating Chapters Out of Order in a Project Plan
A real-world example of using priorities would be a team wanting to translate Genesis in the following order:
- The Joseph story
- The Abraham story
- Other Patriarchs
- Pre-History section
Here is what their translation priorites would look like:
Managing Partial Books with a Project Plan
Some teams want to only translate a few chapters for a book. This is similar to the last example, except the team never intends to translate all of the chapters of a book. Some examples would be translating only a selection of Psalms, or something like translating Exodus up through the Ten Commandments but leaving out the chapters about building the tabernacle:
Details and Procedures
Now that you have seen that the translation priorities feature can make it easier to translate partial books or chapters out of canonical order, you might want to try defining a few translation priorities for yourself.
Note: You have to be a project administrator to define translation priorities in Paratext.
- Searching for “priorities” in the search box in Paratext:
- Watching this short video:
