Re: [be] New subscriber's post (developmental questions)

[Teus Benschop]

Hello Kunio,

Some points are below:

On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 12:13 +0900, Nakamaru Kunio wrote:
> Hello Bibledit-development teams
> 
> Kunio is my name. I am from Japan.
> I am new to Bibledit and this is my first post.
> 
> I believe I have a call from God to do something about Japanese
> Bible translation. We desperately need a copyright free or loose Bible
> translation.
> 
> But I am not a great scholar nor a famous pastor as a such. What I
> can 
> do is to write codes. I would like to develop or contribute to a
> existing development
> for a platform which can help people to translate in a public domain.
> 
> I hope you forgive me if same questions arose before or written
> somewhere. 
> 
> 1. Is Bibledit-Web designed/assumed to be used in a public domain or
> used in a trust team.

The idea behind Bibledit-Web is that various users can log into the
application, and that each user has a certain "level" within the
application. This level will give him or her more or less rights.

1. There's the most basic level, which is "Visitor". A visitor can be
anybody who visit the site and does not log in. Visitors should be able
to see the Bibles being translated on the site.

2. The next level is a "Member". A member is somebody who has signed up
to the site, and has confirmed this signup through his email. This is an
independent process, which means whoever wants can become a "Member".
Members will be able to do the same as Visitors, but in addition they
will be able to raise Issues or "Consultation Notes" on the site. These
notes presumably will be about how a certain passage has been
translated. Members should be able to subscribe to changes in the Bible,
and to changes in Consultation Notes, so that they are notified by email
about this.

3. Then, again the next level, there can be a "Consultant". Consultants
are people who can be consulted because of there knowledge of the
original language such as Hebrew or Greek, or because of their knowledge
of their target language in case they are language scholars, or for any
other knowledge they have. Nobody can become a Consultant by himself,
this level is assigned to him by the Manager.

4. The next level is "Translator". These are the ones that have all the
rights of the Consultant, but in addition can actually change the Bible
text.

5. Then there's the "Manager". The manager has all the privileges of the
previous levels, but in addition can add books to the Bible, delete
books, add chapters, copy Bibles, import, export, and so on. The manager
can assign privileges to the translators, consultants, and so on.

6. Finally, there is the "Administrator". The administrator has all
rights to do anything, and does the technical setup and maintenance of
the site.

This is what is now in the planning, but of course, it will take time to
implement this all. But of course since this is a community project,
other developers could come in and implement their own features, as long
as these features do not "break" existing functionality or cause "loss"
of data.



> 
> 2. Is it planned to support versioning?

Yes, it will support versioning. There will be one well developed system
of versioning, called "Snapshots". Snapshots of the Bible will be taken
whenever a chapter changes. The Translators, probably, will be able to
roll back a chapter to an earlier version, according to a list of
dates / times that is presented to them.


> 3. Is it planned to support branching? or one application site must
> come up with
> one final translation.
> 

The second level of versioning is that it will use a "git" repository,
with all benefits that come with that as a distributed version control
system. But the git repository's functionality is not planned to be
exposed to the user, but it will be the Administrator who, using his
technical knowledge of how git works, can issue some commands on the
command line to get versioning and branching to go. This may require
some additional code to get it to work properly. At present the Git
repository is used for back up  and online/offline collaboration, so
that various installations of Bibledit-Web could collaborate even if
these installations are offline for some time, such as when the internet
connection is out of order.

> Adding notes to 3, I am imaging if a Bible translation work is
> collaborated in public domain, 
> it could be too hard come up with one translation for every verse. It
> is too bad to split
> the team and make a copy of the web application every time they can
> not come up with 
> a common translation. So I am assuming that branching at verse level
> should be supported
> and the final outputs(like whole OSIS, let me call it "a
> distribution") should also be plural. 
> And for each distribution should choose branched verses to take which
> version.

Well, on that issue, if the team cannot agree on one translation for a
verse, we are part of a translation team too and have experience with
that, that, indeed disagreements occur. That is why the concept of
"Consultants" is used, so that the "Translators" can refer matters to
Consultants, and then a vote can be taken so so to find out what the
preferred translation will be for a verse. For this reason a module will
be added with "Consultation Notes".

However, if you'd like to have the branching a the verse level as you
describe, then it needs some additional thoughts how to implement that.


Whoever would like to set up a site for translation can download the
existing code, then install it on a site. The Bibledit Demo site is just
a demonstration to show how it all works, but not to be used for actual
translation work.

Hope it all works out for you,

Teus.

> 
> Blessing & Thank you in advance.
> 
> Kunio Nakamaru
> 
> 
> 
> 
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