jonathon wrote: > Chris wrote: > >> We can assume the Word documents are a good source, so proofing is > > I've seen way too many documents that are not good sources, despite > purporting to be so,to assume that they are good.
Fundamentally, we at CrossWire do not purport to be a text authority and we don't just want to make modules. We want to write Bible software (I'm stealing that line from Bob at Logos), and part of doing that happens to entail building a nice set of resources. So we do depend on the quality of upstream content providers (same as everyone). >> unnecessary beyond verifying that the Sword module is a good representation >> of the Word document originals. > > There is a reason why Logos has somebody proof read their > resources,even when they get clean copy directly from the publisher. I don't know how consistently they do that. It's great if they do, but we should bear in mind that this thread is about an Arabic Bible. We don't have the resources to have someone proof the Arabic Bible. I'm pretty sure that Logos didn't pay anyone to proof their Arabic Bible either. I trust that if they had, they would have corrected their spelling of van Dyck's name and maybe given the title as it appears in American editions and the LOC. Beyond Arabic, we have tons of minority language resources that we would have no hope of ever finding proofreaders for. Following the requirement of finding fluent speakers to do the conversion & proofing would mean we would have to ignore these languages and resources forever. >> The "fluent in the target language" suggestion is just ridiculous. > > Format shifting always introduces errors. The only issue is how > severe those errors are. Always? Certainly not. Format shifting will almost always lose some information from the source, but if it is done skillfully, there should be no loss of important information. For example, with the Arabic Bible, of line breaks, paragraph breaks, and page breaks, only paragraph breaks are retained in the OSIS edition. They're the only ones I assume to have any meaning, the others just being the result of rendering on a page. And having compared to a page in an early print edition, I know the Word docs don't represent the original anyway. That kind of information loss can be inherent to format shifting, but there's no necessity that important information be lost or that errors be introduced. When errors do crop up down the line, it's usually indicative of some error or inconsistency upstream. --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