[sword-devel] Transliteration / Bug in J

[Christian Renz]

Hi Chris,

my comments regarding the display of transliteration next to the text
were meant for all languages (I think that would be equally useful for
all languages).

Regarding the correctness, I was referring to Chinese only. Sorry, I
should have mentioned that :-). There are, of course, scholarly issues
with the Greek and Hebrew text, and I won't go there because I speak
neither language.

>We shouldn't be displaying multiple transliteration options; we
>should be displaying the correct transliteration, taking context into
>account.

For Chinese, I think this is way beyond the scope of Sword. See
e.g. http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/technical.html (Section
"Homograph disambiguation") for a small introduction on why we can't
implement it in Sword unless some Chinese scholar happens to have way
too much time on his/her hands and does it for us.

Let's face it -- the only purpose the transliteration has (for
Chinese) is probably to help learners of the language and to allow
native speakers to look up the occasional character. Therefore, an
easy route would be to display all possible transliterations, e.g. 

  * (wo) * (mén) * (shě) * (tóng) * (háng/xíng) * (men)

("We are colleagues", * standing for a chinese character). I think
that would still be reasonably readable.

A source for that would be e.g. Unihan.txt, a Chinese Characters
database published by the Unicode consortium. You'll probably see it
as a Dictionary Module soon anyway ;-). Another reason to switch to
that source would be that some of the tone marks are missing in the
current transliteration. But I am aware that this is probably not
possible for the current release. I am just giving you the information
so you can consider it.

Another idea would be to allow to connect any Bible translation with a
dictionary. I very much like the Strong's popups (now that I tried
them). It would be nice to be able connect the KJV to the KJVD or
Websters and the Chinese Glory Union to the CEDICT or Unihan (coming
up) module, for example. Just an idea. 

Greetings,
   Christian

-- 
crenz@web42.com - http://www.web42.com/crenz/ - http://www.web42.com/

"The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back,
time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so
anxious not to see."  -- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity