One of the powerful new features in Paratext 8 is the ability to track your progress and to automate checks through the Assignments and Progress window. Progress tracking requires that a project has been assigned a project plan.  If you are the project administrator, you can learn how to do this from our Project Plan video tutorials. If a project plan is in place, this blue icon will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the project window.

Clicking the blue icon will open the Assignments and Progress window for the current book, and depending on whether you are a translator or an administrator, you will see either My Tasks or All Tasks. Tasks are marked complete here one at a time.  Below is an example for the book of Genesis.

This process is fine for new work, but what if you have several books completed when the project was migrated to Paratext 8?  It can be time consuming to individually mark all the tasks for all the books that you have already completed.  Fortunately, there is a much faster way!

Stages Table

There is a table that allows you to mark stages as complete per book. You can select the stages table view by clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of All/My Tasks and selecting Stages Table.    Below is an example of the stages table for an older project. (The project is using the 6-stage SIL project plan.)

In this view, the project administrator can mark whole stages and all the tasks they contain as complete–much faster than marking tasks one at a time!  As stages are checked off, Paratext runs all the checks for the next stage. It is common for Paratext to find issues as it runs the checks on older projects, because Paratext has more rigorous checks than previous versions. In the above example you can see that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all have issues in the third stage that need to be corrected.  Starting that process is as easy as clicking on the blue links in the In Progress column and resolving the issues found by each check.

If the project plan that was applied to your migrated project does not accurately reflect the completed work, you or your project administrator can quickly bring it up to date with the Stages Table.

Paratext is well known for its ability to synchronize data among multiple team members both online and offline. It was designed for use in areas with low bandwidth or no Internet, and so most teams are aware of its ability to synchronize data on a flashdrive. Very few people, however, know about another very useful collaboration option, even though it appears prominently in the Send/Receive dialog box each time you use it.

That option is Chorus Hub. It makes it possible to do Send/Receive over a local network, without using the Internet. Chorus Hub is a small program that you install on one (and only one) of the computers in your team. After you download and install it, it runs in the background and makes itself visible to the other Paratext computers on the network.

In the image above, notice that a computer with the name MARC-PC is running Chorus Hub. The other Paratext computers scan the network, find the Chorus Hub on Marc’s computer, and offer it as a choice for Send/Receive.  In a translation office with poor Internet, all you need is a WiFi access point that is plugged in and running. Even if it is not connected to the Internet, it is the connection point that allows all the computers to share data using Send/Receive in a fraction of the time it would take over a slow Internet connection. If you are paying for bandwidth, it will also save money to do a Send/Receive locally, and sending to the Internet occasionally as a backup and for outside team members.

If you use Paratext Live for working together on a text simultaneously, a Chorus Hub can greatly improve performance when working in the same room as a team. And for normal office days, you can schedule Send/Receive to be done every hour over Chorus Hub using the schedule button. If you have questions about any of these features, you can look them up in the Paratext help menu.

Chorus Hub is developed by SIL for use in synchronizing lexical or Scripture data and can be found at https://software.sil.org/chorushub/

Paratext 8 has a built-in system for tracking your translation team’s progress that can give an estimate of how much time it will take to accomplish your project’s goal.  This can be useful for the team during yearly planning sessions when tasks are assigned to various team members. It can also allow administrators to track their team’s progress and be notified of potential issues long before the next planning and review session.  But if you are going to take advantage of these features, you need to do a bit of configuring.

The first step, of course, is to select a project plan and customize it for your team.  You can learn how to do this by viewing this set of 8 short videos on how to set up and administer the project plan.

Once you have the project plan in place and are using it, you can start to benefit from the progress charts in Paratext 8. These charts are found on the Paratext menu at Projects -> Project Charts… They provide a detailed overview of where the project is currently at using three different views: By Book, By Book and Stage, and Forecast Line Chart.  The last of these needs you to set an expected completion date in the Paratext Registry so that it can contrast your current rate of progress against the target. If no date has been set, Paratext will show this warning at the top of the chart:

To set the target date, you must go to Project Properties and Settings on the Project menu.  You will see an option to Manage registration…

Clicking it takes you to the Paratext registry where you will have to log in with the email address and password you used to register for Paratext.  On that page you will see a place to put the start and expected finish dates for the project.

Once these have been added, Paratext can begin to plot the project’s progress on a trajectory toward the completion date.  In the example below, the black line shows progress to date and the dotted line shows the project’s current trajectory towards completion. When the line falls in the green zone, it shows that progress is going ahead of schedule. But when the line falls in the pink zone, it means that progress is falling behind.

In the example above, you can see that the project is expected to finish in September of 2018 instead of the target date of January 2018.  It may be that this team needs to readjust their expectations for the project completion date, but it also may be that they need to start striving harder to reach that goal.  In either case, it is helpful to have a visual of the team’s progress.

The remaining two charts give more detail.  The following examples are from a sample project with only five books in the project scope.

Progress Chart: By Book

The book chart gives a quick look at the overall progress for each book.  The progress is calculated based on the number of tasks for each book and the effort levels (verses per day) of each task. The effort levels can be adjusted in the project plan to more accurately match your team’s speed.

Progress Chart: By Book and Stage

Similar to the Book chart, this chart shows what stage each book is at and the level of progress for each stage. The six stages shown here are part of the SIL plan, but your project’s plan may be different.

Give the project plan a try! You’ll benefit by being guided through the various translation tasks, and will also to have a better way to measure your team’s progress.

 

 

Paratext 8 is slowly but surely getting new resources added.  Not as fast as everyone would like, of course, but negotiating new licenses for the texts we have used in the past has proven challenging. Not only that, but in a number of cases, the texts we want to use are not yet uploaded to the Digital Bible Library.  Yet progress is being made because almost every time you open Paratext 8 and go to the Download/Install Resources dialog box, you will see certain items marked as new  or updated .  Paratext checks to see which resources have been added since you last looked, and it also checks for newer versions of the resources that you have installed.

In the past couple days there was a flood of updated resources, and you might be wondering what has changed.  It seems that the resources that were available were limited to the canonical books of the Bible and didn’t include any glossaries or extra-Biblical material that may have been included with the resource.  A change had to be made to the repository to fix this, and now all of these updates are coming across, with new content.

It isn’t always a significant update.  For example, for those who have access to the NIV 84 edition, the update is a table of weights and measures found in the extra book “BAK”.  But the update to the World English Bible (accessible to all) includes a glossary with 94 different entries found in the extra book “GLO”. It is very helpful to have model glossaries to look at when preparing your own.  We haven’t looked at all the new goodies that have become available in this recent change to the resource repository.  Please explore on your own and see what new content you can find!