I've sent an answer to Mr Little but, not unexpectedly, he didn't reply. Well, he is strongly defending his own view of the purpose of the SWORD Project, even if everyone else seems to have a different opinion.
I don't know which email you're referring to that you feel I failed to answer, but realize that answering your emails is not my sole purpose in life. Besides, your emails tend to repeat the same points over and over and over and over and over and over again.
I am impressed by the fact that Mr Little wants to rebuild the Romanian Orthodox Bible (ROB) module, a daunting task for someone who doesn't understand the Romanian language. <blah blah blah...>
Bibles all have (roughly) the same 66 books (give or take a testament). And every book is made of some number of chapters. And every chapter is made of some number of verses. In the case of the Romanian Orthodox Bible presented on the pages you sent me, there is not much other markup involved. In any case, it really has nothing to do with language. Remember, we're trying NOT to change or re-order the text like you were. So knowing or not knowing the language of the text is irrelevant.
I hear that Mr Little has begun work on transforming the Vulgate (Clementine version) into the new style. I don't think it will be an improvement.
What new style? Improvement from what?
Indeed, it is likely to be as wrong as the Estonian module, already on the SWORD official site, which defectively repeats the same verse from Exodus to Job.
To repeat, again, the problem with the Estonian Bible module is that it uses the last valid verse for all following empty verses. It was caused by a bug in an import utility. It does not, in any way, indicate that text is missing from the module that occurred in the source documents. I've written this a couple of times (every time it comes up, in fact), so I wonder if you are simply not reading my messages.
<blah blah blah> I really don’t see how Mr Little can deny that the KJV standard is the basis for the entire SWORD project; this just flies in the face of the evidence.
I don't exactly deny that. The KJV versification (v11n) system is the basis for Sword's internal v11n (at the moment, for all intents and purposes). It's a known problem that some of us are working to correct.
However, I'm still not going to accept Bibles that actually have some other v11n, but have been altered to approximate the KJV v11n system.
<blah blah blah>
But Mr. Little hasn't refused only me, he also refused a Polish module creator, Mr Wojciech, (who made the Biblia Gdanska and other Polish modules), Mr Artemis State (with D. Cornilescu's complete Romanian version: the one on the CrossWire site is defective at I Peter 2-5 and it's in an old orthography) and I presume others too.
This is just false. These modules were not rejected, by any means. Of course, that was on the assumption that their versification systems hadn't been altered. If they have, then we would prefer versions without alteration--obviously.
In an earlier communication, Mr. Little wrote: "I would prefer that we simply be given links to source material so that someone from CrossWire can work on the modules themselves. I believe it is less likely that they will editorialize as they do markup & conversion." So we -- the creators of the other modules -- should give up making SWORD modules, and write HTMs instead ? It's a pity that the people at CrossWire don't accept the contributions of learned and meticulous volunteers, who fully understand their texts, only to give themselves the same work, starting from zero and without understanding the texts. It seems discriminatory, to say the least. And I am still worrying about what will happen to the Romanian Orthodox Bible in the hands of someone who has no idea of the Romanian language at all.
Maybe I was a little harsh in that statement, but I'll explain. We want our module sources to be as close as possible to the original electronic versions of the text. Every time someone converts a document from one markup to another, there is a possibility that errors will creep in and that information will be lost. So we want whatever is nearest to the original since it will likely have the fewest errors and the highest rate of information retention. Furthermore, in my experience, individuals who have never encoded a document in XML do not do a very good job the first time. The effort I have to expend to clean up a document from a first-time encoder is usually more than the effort I would have to expend to create the document from scratch from their sources. In addition, I have a lot more experience with OSIS and can be much more confident that I am not accidentally losing information in the process of conversion.
We're not suggesting that people make HTML files, specifically. In the case of the Romanian Orthodox Bible, your sources were online, so simply mailing us the address would have been optimal. People who are creating their own texts from scratch (typing or scanning), can give us documents in whatever format they like (HTML is fine, as are Word, RTF, or even OSIS if they have the ability).
Taking the versification out of their skilled hands and transferring it to an unproven central system of limited linguistic skill seems a shabby reward for their work, and a recipe for confusion in the future.
See... here's the problem. You seem to think you have a right to decide on the versification of a Bible that you didn't translate. We don't believe you do. We believe that decision was already made by its actual translators and that you have no right to impose your own opinions on their work.
From an entirely practical perspective, it is not reasonable to believe that work done by hand will be without mistakes. People who work on repetitive tasks (like adjusting a versification) get tired and begin to make mistakes.
There is a limited set of about 6 versification systems that are used by almost all Bibles. (The exceptions are mostly modern Bibles that differ from these systems in only a few verses.) The mappings between the NRSV system (basically identical to the KJV system) and the other 5 systems are known, documented (by people with more authority than you or me), and available. When we support other v11n systems in Sword, we will use that data to convert between systems rather than whatever ad hoc methods you might be imagining.
--Chris _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
