[sword-devel] Fwd: Chinese Texts

[Martin Gruner]

Today I received an interesting email about Chinese text projects on the 
internet. I guess it is at least interesting for Steve and Christian, maybe 
for other people who want to make good Chinese material available.
Hope it is useful.

Martin

------- Forwarded message follows -------
From:           	"Vincent Yang" <vyang@ccim.org>
To:             	"'Patrick McIntyre'" <signs@centurytel.net>,
 <palm@axios.de>, "'Dr. Fai Cheng'" <faisoft@faisoft.com>
Subject:        	FW: Please join Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization
 Project Date sent:      	Wed, 30 Oct 2002 00:59:30 -0800

Dear Brothers and Sisters:



I found out about your projects related to Chinese Bible in my old email
archive.  So I think you might be interested to know about this bible
text sources update.  If you can compare our code with your sources
code, it will help both of us to correct any errors in the sources.



God Bless his WORD.



Vincent Yang

Webmaster@ccim.org





-----Original Message-----
From: Vincent Yang [mailto:vyang@ccim.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 12:44 AM
To: webmaster@immanuel.net; vincent_leung@exodusis.com;
ibshk@ibs.org.hk; ftang@netscape.com; webmaster@antioch.com.sg
Cc: kjlai@attbi.com; mikeguo@hotmail.com; webmaster@ccim.org;
webservant@o-bible.com
Subject: Please join Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization Project



Dear Brothers and Sisters:



I collected your name from CCIM Bible resource link pages
http://www2.ccim.org/~bible/blink.html.



I would like to report a new update for our Chinese Bible Source code,
would like to invite you to take a look and see if that can benefit your
project.  Also, I would like to invite you to consider join this
project, although I have not figure out the best approach yet.



This bible text version are completely free for any Christian website,
you are welcome to forward to anyone or any site might be interested
update their sources.



If you have any suggestion, feedback, bug report, please send to me for
now, and if God lead more people to involve in this project, we will
setup an email alias, and also setup some source control tools to
coordinate this project.



God Bless His WORD!



Vincent Yang

vyang@ccim.org

Oct. 2002



  _____


Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization Project


Released: Sunday October 20, 2002
Contact: vyang@ccim.org (Temporary)
URL: http://vyang.ccim.org/bible/ChineseBibleProject.htm (Temporary)
Download: http://vyang.ccim.org/bible/bibleproject.zip (Temporary)


Overview:


There are several Chinese Bible sites available on internet.  Most of
them use Union Bible Version from an previous version created by
pioneers who typed in manually or converted using OCR program.  We
obtained three versions from ccim.org, O-bible.org and BST 2.0.  The
goal is to create a consolidated version Chinese Union Code Base, to
provide standardized version for Chinese communities.  We get it for
free, and will provide it for free.

This release fixed all the errors caught by comparing three different
versions.  Most importantly, we fixed most of the characters out of
normal BIG5 or GB character set, ie. we removed any characters in
extended Chinese character sets.

Further work might be needed to standardize on symbols, signs, as well
as he/she/it/HE, etc.

We used Chinese Union - English NIV Bible, published by Hymnody and
Bible House, @1990, Sixth Printing May 1993 as our exclusive reference.


Sources:


Original data file came from three sources:

http://bible.ccim.org
http://www.o-bible.org/
http://www.holyseed.org/bst

Special thanks to Brother San Lin and Jason Chan for providing the data
files.  Without them, this project would not be possible.  Praise the
Lord.


Package Contents:


ccim_b5.txt:

BIG5 Version text in CCIM.org & O-Bible.ORG format.


ccim_gb.txt:

GB version text in CCIM.ORG & O-Bible.ORG format.


ChineseBibleProject.htm:

This readme HTML


What's changed, and what's not?


We searched for errors mostly by compare text files.  We use Perl and
windiff.exe as main tools; use WORD for editing because it's much faster
than notepad and also its great support for both GB and BIG5 encoding
and converting.

We fixed: mostly typo, and misused characters, especially in Simplified
vs. Traditional cases, and extended characters ranges, missed or extra
characters.

We did not change: signs and symbols, he/she/it/HIM, the commenting
style, and several special characters that was not distinguishable in
ancient Chinese, for example, character for "where" and "there".


Next steps:


The first step is to pass these updated files to known Chinese Bible
hosting sites and software venders.  Even if they could not use it
directly, they might compare to their file, and benefit from the fixed
we caught in this release.

After that, if God permits, we will start an open source project to have
more brothers and sisters contribute to this project.  I envision an
virtual group to collaborate on this effort, and we need better software
tools to merge and verify changes from different members.

If you are interested or have comments for this project, please send to
the contact email above.  I will create an email group, likely on
yahoogroup, to distribute the email.

Please keep us in your prayer.  Praise to the Highest!


Participate Sites:


http://bible.ccim.org
http://www.o-bible.org


------- End of forwarded message -------

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