Paratext began as a tool to help Bible translators do exegesis of the original Greek and Hebrew texts. It was expanded into a translation environment and became the tool of choice for the United Bible Societies. SIL, on the other hand, had started developing a similar product, but one that would integrate with the lexical data that a translation team would collect as part of their foundational linguistic research in a language group. Their product was called FieldWorks Translation Editor, affectionately know as “T-E”. As UBS’ Paratext gained popularity, the two organizations found themselves in competition with each other. In 2010, administrators and developers from the two organizations got together and made the challenging decision to combine development efforts into a single product. Because Paratext had the biggest user base, it seemed the best way forward was to merge critical features from Translation Editor into Paratext, thus creating ParaTExt. In Paratext 7 the TE in the logo was a tribute to collaboration that helped improve the Paratext we all use today. Since Paratext 8, we no longer capitalize the TE in the logo.
