Conflicts between Bible-text languages & interface language

[ErikJon]

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Thank you again for your wonderful program. Until now my suggestions have been on issues of little importance, but this one is rather big. Please bear with me as I describe the problem by means of a little background.

I am a native English speaker. I am a missionary working in a Spanish-speaking country. I use TW extensively for preparing discipleship materials, evangelism materials, and teaching materials of all sorts. I have my TW interface in English, because English is my native language, and it is easier for me to do research in English and move around in TW. In my daily Bible readings using TheWord, I alternate between Spanish and English, reading the RVR1960 and the KJV respectively. (I guess that most English-speaking missionaries do things this way.) All of my teachings here are in Spanish, but not all of my daily tasks on the computer. I have written over 900 pages of material in Spanish, and in it I have had to copy and paste over 5,000 verses in Spanish. Still others I write in English, and copy and paste verses to support the points, in English, sometimes at the same setting.

Now, then, when copying these 5,000 verses in recent years, and pasting them into the word processor, to my surprise, TheWord always puts the verse correctly in Spanish, but the reference in English. Over 5,000 times I have had to change each reference manually in my word processor, so that it will appear correctly into Spanish.

Another similar problem that occurs when I build a "verse list" of 75 verses in Spanish, for the purpose of quickly making a list to hand out to other Spanish speakers: the verses appear in Spanish, but the references, in Englsih.

After one year with TW I discovered that by changing the interface into Spanish, my references would begin to appear in Spanish. It occurred to me then that TW was tying all the Bible references copied, to the interface language rather than to the Bible-text language being copied each time.

In other words, if I need to paste a verse in Spanish, the reference appears in English; if I copy a text in Japanese, the reference appears in English. If I should send a verse to a friend, in German, unfortunately he will have to read his reference in English, if he can understand it. While this certainly seems to be a good strategy for someone who would like to force everyone to learn English, it does not seem to be a convenient approach for those of us who want to keep the whole Bible quotation in only one language or the other. (Perhaps you are really a secret agent working for Berlitz Language Schools?)

Perhaps I am doing something wrong? Perhaps there is a foreign-language plug-in that I am missing? I have English, Spanish (INT) and Spanish (ES) installed as the only options in my interface. Am I still missing a plug-in for matching reference languages to the Bible text languages?

All I know is that it has been very inconvenient to change manually 5,000 references to date, and every week, the list grows larger.

At the moment, my only options seem to be: (1) to switch the interface back and forth, all day long, every ten minutes, just so that, each time, the reference language will match the Bible text that is being copied, or (2) to make 5,000 changes manually after writing my publications, or (3) do a search-and-replace of 66 different book-titles of the Bible, at the end of each day's writing, just to make sure all of them are in Spanish. None of these options is very convenient, as you can imagine.

Of course I am grateful to have your program, and grateful for all that it is capable of doing. I do not mean to criticize the program, but only to offer a suggestion that would make work so much easier for other users who constantly work in two languages at once, having a preference for one or the other.

In any case, it certainly seems peculiar to me, that the "references" are not linked linguistically to the verse that they supposedly "reference."

MY HUMBLE SOLUTION PROPOSED:

1. Link the Bible references not to the user interface, but always to the Bible text being copied, or,
2. Better yet, allow the user to decide for himself, in the preferences, how TheWord should handle this issue:
3. Allow him to choose between two options, selectable by one of two radial buttons that could say:
( ) "Display Bible references according to the language of the Bble text selected"
( ) "Display Bible references in the language selected for the program interface"

4. If you want to allow the user to refine these preferences even further, you could offer him checkboxes like these:
( ) "Display in this way, all verse lists"
( ) "Display in this way, when using the 'copy verses' dialog box"
( ) "Display in this way, within the Bible tree"

(I cannot remember for the moment which other parts of the program are affected by this phenomenon, but if there are others, perhaps they should be listed as additional options in this last section mentioned. I suppose that some of them would be more easily addressed than others.)

Anyway, thank you again for your attention, and thanks again for the nice program.

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[csterg]

There are so many issues and difficulties behind this suggestion that it is difficult even to begin to enumerate; I will just bring up a few to try to give an idea.

I totally understand your use case and why you do need to do what you do. There is a quick solution though for what you do (and I know others do that): create a second installation of theWord in another folder (a compact one) and put in there just the 2-3 Spanish translations you want to be copying verses from: keep the interface language of this installation in Spanish and so all copying of verses will work consistently. You fire up this copy of theWord whenever you need to copy verses. You fire up your normal installation for all other work.

Now, back to what you say:
I don't want to say that it is a bad idea, it's not. Of course, given enough time, the best thing is always to have all options and let the end user choose. Now, if there is not enough time to implement everything and one has to choose, I think the best thing is to do what is already there.
Most users actually use theWord to study for themselves. So, imagine when an English speaking person switches to a Hebrew or Greek text to take a look at the original and suddenly the name of the books become Greek or Hebrew... I don't think this would be very helpful. And to be honest, I think that there are many more users doing this, than copying verses to non-native users. My point is that the way theWord is currently works is what makes sense for most users.

Now, back to the difficulty in implementing what you ask:
handling languages transparently is a difficult thing. Maybe for 'major' languages (like German, Spanish and French) things are simple; but when you get to languages that are not so widely used (or known), things get complex.

Now back to the program: Book names are not only used in the Bible view, but they are used in dozens other places throughout the program, and the question is "what should be used there?". If you take a look around, you will see for example that one can search multiple Bibles at at time, or one can search at the same time 10 different commentaries, each in a different language, for a reference of a Greek word, and the results are displayed per Bible book: so what book is used there?
I am just saying that once we get in the mode of using the book names of the 'current' Bible (if there was such an one), the complexity of coding and for the end-user becomes so big that it gets out of control very fast...

If theWord was a simple Bible reader, then this would be very simple to do, but it's not. You can find simple Bible readers (especially mobile apps) doing this, and it is very simple to do there, but here things are very complex.
Costas

[ErikJon]

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O.K., Costas. You are the programmer, so I will take your word for it.

Yes, I suppose that the user, theoretically, would have to pick his preferred language, in the preferences, for cases where the search results were in different languages. That's why it occurred to me to offer him several options, such as applying this preference only to the "copy verses" dialog.

Speaking of which, would it be easier to provide the preference I suggested, within the "copy verses" dialog? I don't know much about programming, and even less about the architecture of your program, but I assume that all the book titles are defined somewhere at the root of the program, in a database on which all other parts of the program depend.

Consequently--laying aside for a moment the issue of the book tree, the search windows, and other affected parts of the program, and focusing only on the "copy verses" issue--another related idea that occurred to me, long ago, was to suggest to you the inclusion of a little "override preference" window accessible only within "copy verses", in which the user could define not only his own "special" preference regarding the desired form for references, but also his preferred abbreviation for each. Something like a screen with 66 fields for user input, that would form a base to be used ONLY for the "copy verses" process. In such a case, even if the interface were in English, or any other language, the "copy verses" dialog would refer to this special set alone, for information regarding how to display the references.

And, in the same way that you have sort of a "toggle" already applied between the "copy and close" button and the "cancel" button, so that whichever button was last used is the one that remains active each time the "copy verses" dialog is invoked, in the same way you could allow the user to apply this "override" using a toggle, just in case he wants his references in the interface language, while in the middle of his work. I am just tossing out ideas.

After all, it has always seemed a bit strange to me that, in spite of the many preference options offered to the user in many different Bible-study programs, they do not usually allow him to define the formatting for the reference, but only to choose from one or two pre-defined options. This "override" window, on the other hand, would seem to be a convenient spot to allow him to decide for himself, once and for all.

As for this formatting, while it seems to be no longer in fashion to use roman numerals, except perhaps by some Roman Catholic writers, it appears that many prefer to use colons to separate the chapter from the verse, others use commas, and still others use periods. In the U.S. we always used the colon (e.g., John 3:16) whereas in Latin America the period (e.g., Juan 3.16). It seems that TW requires us to use the colon always. Why don't many programs offer this simple option of choosing, or of typing into a field whichever separator the user may desire, so that it will apply to all "copy verses" procedures?

Incidentally, TW also forces us to use TW's pre-defined abbreviations for everything, and that, without the period each time. (e.g., Rm 1:1 vs. Ro. 1.1) Not a big deal, but certainly curious.

I am attaching two silly screenshots of this basic idea that occurred to me, long ago, which do not really illustrate the point too well, but, if it is all the same to you, I will upload them below.

Feel free to regard any of my comments as mere nonsense. I simply get ideas while using the program, and jot them down, and now, one year later, I finally decided to post some of them.

I am at least glad to hear that you see my point.

[csterg]

All these can be customized in theWord, but not through the interface.
Open the english.lng file and search for [Books]. The rv_bk_alias_X degines the names of the books, you can customize them there.
Search for the chapter.verse.separator property if you want to change that. You may also want to change the digits (e.g. for Arabic digits)

All these are quite advanced setting so changing them in the .lng file makes sense for an advanced user (although notice that with upates the .lng file is overwritten, so you do need to keep a copy of your changes and re-do them)
Costas

[ErikJon]

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Thank you for the secret!

[csterg]

No big secret there