[sword-devel] Greek-Dutch and Greek-English Interlinear

[Chris Little]

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Simon wrote:

> The base translation text for the English will be the KJV, for the Dutch
> the Statenvertaling.

We will actually have an interlinearized form of the KJV completed when 
the KJV2003 is finished.  It would be good to go back and convert it into 
an interlinear Greek text, where the word order follows the Greek instead 
of the KJV, but that exercise is mostly mechanical.

> The Greek text I want to use is the Majority Text, but to avoid
> problems, I need to be sure that the Greek text I use is not
> copyrighted. I think I will use the text that is in the Byz-module, or
> else the text of the TR-module (but I prefer the Byz-reading). So, can
> anybody tell me if those texts are 100% in the Public Domain...? I also
> want to know if there are any known errors in that versions..

You should try to figure out which Greek text the translation you use is 
based on and use that as a base (if it is available).  That means a TR for 
the KJV and whatever you are translating for your Dutch translation (or 
the basis of a translation you're updating, if that's the case).

However, all of our texts come from 
http://www.byztxt.com/download/index.html, which states that they are all 
Public Domain.  

> The other question I have is: what kind of markup do you suggest (I
> don't want to spend too much time with adding markup, but I also want to
> easely make a Sword module out of the text)? I prefer something like:
> 
> 1 εν |in <i>the</i>| <1722> (PREP) αρχη |beginning| <746> (N-DSF) ην

I don't have much of a suggestion for markup, unless you want to use OSIS
(which I would suggest if you're comfortable using XML).  However, your
example does highlight one issue.  The second English word here is not
actually indicated by the first Greek word (hence the italics), so it
should probably be placed between (PREP) and the second Greek word.  You
might also want to indicate word divisions somehow since it will make
importing simpler in cases like this.  (Using OSIS simplifies this too.  
You might be able to convince Troy to help you by extending his
interlinearizer tool (http://www.crosswire.org/sword/kjv2003/index.html)  
to be a more general translation tool, which amount to working directly 
with a Sword module in OSIS format.  So you could edit and test in Sword 
immediately.)

--Chris