Yes, a sentence is a MEANINGful unit (whereas verse breaks are pretty
much nothing to do with meaning).
I found that our mother-tongue translators (and even myself --
horrors!) often worked on one VERSE at a time as a unit in Paratext,
because a paragraph is too long to get your head around at a time, but
there was no tool/view that encouraged you to work on a sentence at a
time. But as a principle, I really hate the idea of taking a totally
artificial chunk like a verse and using it as a translation unit.
But in the case of the long second Greek sentence in Ephesians (and
many other places where one or more sentence breaks need to be added
for understandability), this is where your translators would be really
helped by a further option to put a front or model translation
(particularly one from your
target family of cultures) between the original and their new work.
And yes, multiple views are more likely to please more people.
Blessings,
Robert.
P.S. One of my personal "spare-time" aims for the first quarter of this
year is to do a review and evaluation of Bibledit -- where it is at and
where it seems to be heading. (I hope to post such reviews on
http://www.freely-given.org/.) I'll be glad of your input when I get to
it.
bahasa kita wrote:
Robert,
Are you meaning organizing the display based on sentences in Greek or
Hebrew? So often we need to break or reorganize sentences in the
languages we are working with.
What we really need is the flexibility to have to various views, that
one can select via a hot key or the click of an icon. That way would, I
hope, encourage people to see paragraph chunks, while giving the
flexibility to organize the screen differently. For instance, when
searching for things, it is still helpful to have the option of a verse
view.
Phil
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Robert Hunt <address@hidden>
wrote:
Maybe a sentence view would be better than a verse view if you have to
have smaller chunks than paragraphs.
But yes, we need to keep minimizing anything that highlights individual
verses (except as a way to find a passage). Verse breaks are totally
unnatural and often quite arbitrary. (And verses are far too often
quoted out of context as if they are some kind of magic charm.)
Robert.
bahasa kita wrote:
You're right, Dennis,
that the table format will not encourage MTTs to look beyond verse
boundaries. In fact, I found that I made the mistake of focusing too
much on the verse level just today.
It is ironic that translators often request to see things in a
verse-by-verse format, as it helps us to find things on the screen. I
know that this was frequently requested in the development of Paratext,
as I was one who requested this myself! But I was told that the Bible
Societies wanted to encourage people to see beyond verses by keeping
the main view in paragraph format. But for all of their careful
planning, I'm not sure that paragraph format will really help MTTs to
focus on chunks wider than a verse. It really is something we will have
to put into our training.
You're right. That final-read through before publishing helps people
see naturalness issues! I found my share of changes in the Orya NT!
Phil
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