Paratext News Articles

Do you find yourself stuck trying to type characters into Paratext that are infrequent but hard to find?  Have you ever gone to a Word document to find a character and paste it into your translation? Have you ever memorized the Alt + Number pad sequence for a special character and typed it in?  Then this article is for you.  Read on!

When many accented or special characters are needed, you should use a custom keyboard from Keyman, or Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). However, many projects only need to type a few characters that are not on the physical keyboard. These would include special punctuation such as the em dash, ellipsis, curly quotes, and one or two accented characters. In cases like this, you can use Paratext’s autocorrect feature instead.

Autocorrect

Just like Word, Paratext has an autocorrect feature that the user can configure. You may not have heard of it because there is no option on the menu called autocorrect.  …

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?  …

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. …

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. …

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.   …

Paratext 7 came with 121 resource texts in forty different languages. What is in store for users of Paratext 8?

A resource text is a text that is not editable and is available for other translators to use as a model text or to gain insight into possible ways to render a difficult passage. When an ideas or object in the original language doesn’t have a direct equivalent in the receptor language, the translator looks for creative ways to describe it in the receptor culture. Take the word “throne” for example. It often refers not to a chair, but is representative of a kingdom and its power or authority. And even when it does refer to the chair a king sits on, that can also be difficult to express in cultures where chairs are not used. In these cases, a translator will look to translations from similar cultures in the area to see how the ideas were expressed. …