Paratext

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What’s New in Paratext 9

Menu system

  • The menu system in Paratext has changed from having menus visible all the time (above the toolbar) to having menus that are accessible by clicking on a menu icon: .
  • The series of menu items to open various items has been reduced to a single “Open” command on the main menu.

Enhanced Resources

  • An Enhanced Resource is a resource text in which many words and phrases are linked to source language research material. That research material assists users to complete a high-quality translation by helping them do exegetical study or other research tasks on source-language words and phrases.

Window framework

  • You can open items in panels, tabs, floating windows, or the autohide area and can then arrange them in a layout to help you do your work.
  • The default for opening a tool is to open it as a floating window.
  • You can close everything that is open in Paraetext without closing Paratext itself. (Click the main menu icon, then from the Window menu, select Close all.

Layouts (formerly called Text Combinations)

  • If you save a text combination in Paratext 8, you can open it as a layout in Paratext 9.0 (and later).
  • You can share a layout with others.
  • If you open a shared layout but your computer is missing resources or projects in that layout, Paratext will offer to Send/Receive the projects you are missing and to Download/Install the resources you are missing.

VPN Internet Access

  • You can disable Internet use in sensitive locations but still connect to the Internet through a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Ruby Glossing

  • You can add ruby glossing to Chinese characters (called “Han characters”).

Registration issues

  • You can change your Paratext Registration Name.

USFM

  • You can change the USFM version used in an existing project.
  • You can select the USFM version used in a new project when you create that project.

Parallel Passages tool

  • You can choose to either display a single check box per set of parallel passages, or display a check box for each verse in a set of parallel passages. Depending on your choice, clicking to put a tick in the check box either approves all verses in a particular set of parallel passages or approves an individual verse.
  • The verse references in the Parallel Passages tool have fewer color distinctions.

Resources

In the Download/Install Resources dialog box:

  • Enter text in the “Filter Text” box to limit the resources displayed to those that contain that text in their “Name”, “Full Name”, or “Language”.
  • In the “Full Name” column, resources that have been updated since you downloaded them are labeled “Update” and resources that are new are labeled “New”

Biblical Terms

Instead of marking and unmarking occurrences of Biblical Terms renderings as having a glossary entry, you now link or unlink occurrences of Biblical Terms renderings to a glossary entry.

Miscellaneous

  • You can import words from a spell-checking dictionary into the Wordlist.
  • The address to which to report problems, bugs, or errors is: [+support@paratext.org+](mailto:support@paratext.org).
  • If a back translation is in the active tab, Status of Back Translation appears on the View menu. If status check boxes do not appear, click Status of Back Translation to display them.
  • You can ignore whitespace differences in anything that includes one or more whitespace characters.
  • In a Text Collection, a slash in a text in the left pane indicates that there is a line break or poetic marker at that point in the text.
  • For a project on the Paratext registry, you no longer need to Send/Receive it when you modify user permissions.
  • If data in your project uses a mix of composed and decomposed characters (likely due to using different keyboard layouts), you will no longer have false errors when either comparing texts, reviewing recent changes, or looking at project history.
  • There is a new command to Send/Receive this project. (Click the project menu icon on a project and find the Send/Receive this project menu item.)
  • There is a new way to report a bug or to make a feature request.
  • If open items in Paratext belong to more than one scroll group, there is a letter (or symbol) at the lower right of the tab icon to indicate which scroll group each open item belongs to.

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Applying a Project Plan to your Existing Project

Applying a Project Plan to an existing project is one of the biggest frustrations for teams that are starting to use the Project Plan to manage assignments and keep track of their progress.  You may have a dozen books that are already consultant checked and some that have already been printed.  Yet, when you or your administrator applies a new plan to your project, you find that you are unable to mark tasks as done for work that is already completed.  The Stages Table provides a simple grid (below) that is supposed to make this easy, but as you will soon see, it doesn’t work as expected.

With a single click, the administrator can check off all the tasks in a stage as being complete.  Let’s suppose that Genesis has already been consultant checked and printed.  We want to mark all six stages as having been completed.  We start by marking Drafting as complete:

Now all the tasks in the drafting stage have been marked as complete for the book of Genesis. Next, we can mark Team Checking as complete (At the time of this writing there seems to be a bug.  You may have to click outside of the Assignments and Progress window and then back inside the window before you can mark the next stage as complete). After we do this for the first three stages in our sample project, we are suddenly blocked.  In the image below, Paratext says that we have over 4,000 issues to resolve in Genesis before we can mark the consultant check as being completed!

This is where the frustration begins.  Genesis has already been checked and completed in Paratext 7 a while ago, and the team does not have the time to go back over everything. What can they do?!

Fortunately, we have recently discovered a workaround to resolve this problem. It is the perfect solution for applying a project plan to a project that has existing text.

How to mark tasks complete for previous work

The reason that Paratext won’t let you proceed is that the automatic checks have discovered problems that are supposed to be resolved before the stage can be marked complete.  Often these are things like missing Biblical term renderings or unknown spelling status for words.  You may, in fact, want to revisit these before your final publication, but not now!  You just want Paratext to show the correct status for the book of Genesis, and any others that have been completed.  The project administrator can bypass these error messages and correctly mark the completed stages in three simple steps:

  1. Temporarily turn off automated checks
  2. Use the Stages Table to mark the completed stages for existing books
  3. Turn the automated checks back on

Temporarily turn off automated checks

Go to the Project Plan on the menu.

Paratext 8: Project -> Project Plan -> Checks tab
Paratext 9: Project -> Project Settings -> Project Plan -> Checks tab

Make a note of each check and the stage at which it is set to run.  You can take a screenshot using PrtScn (Print Screen) and paste it into a Word document, or you can write it down on paper.

Once you have made note of all the settings there, set them all to “None”:

Save the new settings by clicking the OK button.

Use the Stages Table to mark the completed stages for existing books

The stages table is found by clicking on the blue icon for Assignments and Progress and selecting Stages Table from the dropdown menu. You will now be able to use the Stages table to mark the actual stage of completed books.  You will not receive any messages about errors in the text that need to be resolved.

Turn the automated checks back on

You must now set the automated checks back the way they were.  Although the checks will continue to signal errors in the books that you have marked as complete, it will not undo the progress that you have marked.  This is important.  We don’t want to hide any issues that may need to be resolved in the future.  For now, your project’s progress will be correctly indicated and you can address things like global spelling issues before the next publication.

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Paratext Event Calendar

The Paratext website is an obvious place to list training events for people to learn Paratext or improve their skills.  To facilitate this, we have launched an events section on the website where Paratext training events will be listed, starting with a Paratext Training Course in Dallas, Texas, December 3-10.  Since there are so many organizations using Paratext, we can’t know about all of the training events going on around the world. So we are including a link on our events page for training event submissions. If your organization is hosting a training event and is able to make it open to others, we would encourage you to list it here.

If you have a larger group that needs training, please write to help@paratext.org and we will see if there is a trainer who is available to travel to your area.  Our goal is for every Paratext user to be working effectively with the software.

Whether you can attend a training event or not, you can always take advantage of our online training videos, found at https://vimeo.com/channels/paratext

We will continue to keep these videos up-to-date with future versions of Paratext, and are currently making localized versions in Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Indonesian.

—

The Paratext Support Team

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Setting up for Progress Tracking

Organisations that want to track the progress of their various translation projects may now do so through Paratext. This is possible through the use of the project plan, and assigning tasks to team members. As tasks are completed, the progress is recorded. This data can be accessed by people in the organisation with the appropriate roles.

However, the tracking will only work with the proper set up and planning. The following features must be in place before progress can be tracked successfully.

Set the scope

First, the team has to set the scope of their project. Which books will they translate? This new feature was added for the purpose of tracking progress.  If a New Testament is the goal, then only those books are selected for the scope.  All projects must have the correct scope set in their Project Properties and Settings.

Apply a plan

Next, Paratext comes with a standard set of boilerplate project plans from SIL, UBS, and Seed Co. The project administrator must select and apply one to the project. We recommend that projects choose the plan provided by their organisation or a locally approved variant. All projects must have a project plan applied.

Customise the plan

The boilerplate plan will not be accurate for any given team, since each team has their own unique set of tasks.  We recommend that teams preserve the main stages that have been established by their organisation. Within those stages they are free to customise the specific tasks for their project.  All projects must customise the project plan for their situation.

Set a target completion date

While Paratext is designed to show progress, it can’t interpret that process unless the team actually sets a target completion date. Without a target date, the project members or observers won’t be able to interpret the status of the current rate of progress. Paratext can provide a helpful chart that shows whether the team is ahead behind schedule by comparing their current rate of progress with the anticipated rate of progress to reach their goal.  All projects must set a target completion date in the Paratext registry.

Mark progress

Now, a blue button will appear in the top right corner of the project window, allowing administrators to assign tasks to translators, and allowing translators to see their list of tasks.  When a task is completed, the translator must mark the task as complete. Progress is noted in the system when tasks are marked as complete. All projects must actively use the Assignments and Progress window to mark their progress.

Now we’re tracking!

Having done all of the above, we can now track project progress.  The mechanism to do this is a bit rudimentary for the moment, but working.  The first thing to note is that there are two ways to view progress: Through the progress website, or through the Paratext progress API — a way to extract the progress data and view it in whatever format we want to, using our own tools and interface.

Progress.paratext.org

This site has been set up with the goal of allowing an organisation to review and approve the recorded progress by a team, acting as a check and balance before that progress gets recorded on the progress.bible website. Not all organisations will do this as part of their workflow, but for now, it allows people who are granted the role of Progress Reviewer to see the reported progress of projects today.

Paratext progress API

Paratext organisations will be able to set up their own systems to report on the progress data accessed through the Paratext progress API. This is the intended way for organisations to view and interpret their progress data.

 

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Important issues to resolve prior to Paratext 8 migration

And how to fix them if it’s too late

Now that we have been doing migrations of Paratext data for quite some time, we have put together a list of things that should be considered at the time of migration.  This is great news if you are at the point of migrating your Paratext 7 project to Paratext 8. But don’t worry, even if you have already completed the migration, we’ve provided instructions for you too. It isn’t too late, but you might have some extra steps involved. Please read through the list below, and follow these topics to the website for more information if you should deal with any of these issues.

Is the project short name (abbreviation) how you want it?

It is recommended project short names include the ISO language code.  Migration is the time to change the name of your project to something more meaningful to those outside of your translation team.  During migration, it is not possible to change the short name.  The old shortname will be copied over and used during the registration process. Once that code is in the registry, it can’t be changed without deleting the registration. You can use the Convert Project tool that is built into Paratext 7.6 or Paratext 8 to change the short name. See Using the Convert Project Tool for instructions.

Already migrated?

Although it is easier to change the short name just prior to migration, you can still do this afterwards. See Using the Convert Project Tool for instructions.

Has your data been entered using mixed encoding?

Unicode has a number of characters that are precomposed, but can exist in the data in either composed or decomposed forms. In the image below, the source character on the left can be represented in either Normally Fully Decomposed (NFD) format or Normally Fully Composed (NFC) format.

The Å and the ô can be represented with two separate characters (decomposed) or with a single character (composed). Either way, they appear identical. Different keyboards enter the data in either composed or decomposed format. If your data has been entered by more than one keyboard, it is possible that you have a mixture of these encoding forms in your data. In Paratext, the mixed data encoding can result in the following problems:

  • You use the search window to find “trône” in the text. You know the word is there, but Paratext doesn’t find it, or only finds some of the occurances.
  • Your word trône is marked incorrect by the spell checker, but the suggested correct word looks identical to you.
  • You add “trône” as a Biblical term rendering, but Paratext doesn’t find it in the current verse, even though you are looking right at it.

Paratext 8 can normalize the characters to either composed (recommended) or decomposed, no matter what keyboard is used to enter them. If you have some of the above problems with your data, you will want to turn on normalization in Paratext 8.

Unfortunately, normalization cannot be applied during migration. Instead, you have to convert your data before migration. See Using the Convert Project Tool for instructions.

Already migrated?

You can still fix this. See Using the Convert Project Tool for instructions.

Need to change your Paratext user registration name?

Is the name on your Paratext 7 registration incorrect? You must use the same name to register for Paratext 8, but afterwards, you can correct the name when logging in to the registry.

Please note that the old username will still be visible in the project history.  If that is a security concern, you will have to change the name using project conversion as explained in Using the Convert Project Tool.

Already migrated?

You can still fix this. It is more difficult to create a new user registration in Paratext 8 than in Paratext 7 because the Paratext 8 registration does not allow the same email address to be used for both accounts. Even with a second email address, it can be problematic to change the address later. A better solution for changing your registration name is in the works, but if you need to do it now, follow these steps:

  1. User does a send/receive on all projects he or she belongs to
  2. Admin removes the user from all projects and does a send/receive on those projects. (If the user is an admin, the admin role must be transferred temporarily to someone else in the team)
  3. Delete the user account in the registry
  4. Create the new user account
  5. If changing the name for security reasons, use the Convert Project tool to replace the old registration name in the history. If not, the user must ask to be added back on all the old projects.

Is the type of your project indicated correctly?

In Paratext 8, your team should normally have only one officially registered standard project per language which will be listed in the Paratext registry. The type of this project is a standard translation. Earlier versions of Paratext had only one project type. Later, as new project types were added, many users have left all their projects configured as standard translations. Unless these are corrected, those projects are treated as standard translations for registration. Not only is this extra work for you, but it also puts mislabeled projects into the Paratext registry, and we don’t want them. Here are some examples of projects that are not standard translations:

  • Back translation projects (label them as Back Translation)
  • Team or personal notes (label them as Auxiliary or Consultant Notes)
  • A draft version that is for the teams internal use and not for publishing (label them as Auxiliary)

Before migration, it is easy to correct the translation type:

  • Back Translation
    • Go to Project Properties and Settings, and set Type of Project to Back Translation, then in the field below, specify the standard project that the back translation is based on. In Paratext 8, a back translation does not require a separate registration, it uses the same registration as the project it is based on. If you have not specified which project it is based on before migration, you cannot do this after migration.
  • Auxiliary
    • Any project that you’ve used for various stages of translation leading up to the final stage, or any notes projects and such should be changed from Standard Project to Auxiliary. Then in the field below, specify the standard project that it is related to.
  • Consultant Notes
    • If you do have a standard project that you use for notes and you want to continue to use it with many projects, you have a few options:
      • If you do not send/receive this project with anybody, and it is just for personal use, then you may migrate it, but not register it in the registry. The registry is not for notes.
      • You can change it to Auxiliary (as above) and link it to another project. Even it it is not related to that project, you can use it and share it without having to register it.
      • Preferably, you should create a new Consultant Notes project and copy these notes manually to that project. Using your notes with multiple projects is exactly what the Consultant Notes project was intended for.

Already migrated?

You may have added back translations and auxiliary texts to the registry as standard translations.  It is important to fix this for the integrity of the registry!  Unfortunately, once the project has been registered in Paratext 8, it is not possible to change the Type of Project in Project Properties and Settings, as the option is now grayed out:

Fortunately, you can still correct this by manually deleting the registration.  Follow these steps:

  1. Have all team members do a send and receive of the project, then you do a send/receive.
  2. In Paratext 8, go to the Project menu and select Delete Project… (Don’t worry, we are not going to delete the project)
  3. Select the Project you want to unregister in the first field.
  4. Select “Show more actions…” in the second field as shown below:
  5. Select “Keep only my copy, delete for others; delete registration.”
  6. Select OK.  Paratext may give you multiple warnings about deleting the project. That is unfortunate, since we are not actually deleting the project from your computer. Go ahead and accept the warnings.
  7. Now, when you return to Project Properties and Settings, you will see that Type of Project is now modifiable.  Set it to Auxiliary or Back Translation as appropriate.
  8. Do a Send/Receive
  9. Now, each team member that the project was shared with will have to go to the Project menu and choose Delete Project…
  10. They must choose the project and select the default option: Delete this project from this computer only.
  11. Once they have deleted the project, they may do a Send/Receive and will have the project back with the correct project type selected.

Are your language settings correct?

Your project may not have the correct language and language identifier specified.  When a new project is created “English” is the default language, and no language identifier is selected.  You can check these settings for a project by going to Project→ Project Properties and Settings.

Language is the writing system used for your project and includes the alphabet and all word-forming characters such as hyphens, accents and tone marks. Language identifier is the ISO/ethnologue code that uniquely identifies the language being translated. These two settings need to be correct before migration to Paratext 8.

To change the Language setting click on the drop down arrow next to “2” and select the language being translated.  If your language is not on the list, click the New button and create a writing system for your language.  Follow the instructions on the guide to specify the upper and lower case letters including accented characters and digraphs needed by the language.  Do not include letters unused by the language.  Click on the Other Characters tab and specify the word medial punctuation needed by the language.  It is common to need the hyphen for hyphenated words and the apostrophe for contractions or vowel elision.  Remove any punctuation that is not allowed word medially in your writing system. When the settings are correct, click OK button.

To specify a language identifier click on the Choose button next to the number “3”.

Type in the language name or the ISO code, then select the correct language for the list and then click OK.  Use the Advanced tab if you need to specify a variant such as English_Austrailian.  Most projects will not use the this tab. If the language is not on the list, scroll down to the end of the list and choose “Language Not Listed qaa”.

Already migrated?

You can still fix this. When looking at Project Properties and Settings, Paratext 8 will redirect you to the registry to make any changes to the language.

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