Study Aids for New Translations

Chitra Chhetri is a Translation Consultant based in Nepal. Together with colleagues from all over SE Asia he attended the ICAP workshops in Thailand in 2007. The BFBS team were also at the workshop giving demonstrations of their systems but the most impressive demonstration came from Dr Chhetri. Less than a week after first having seen the BFBS Concordance Builder demonstration he was able to show his colleagues a first draft concordance to the Nepali New Testament which he had compiled using the system.

How it works

The Concordance Builder uses the BFBS glossing technology to generate automatically a new concordance based on an existing concordance in another language. In this case the original was the BFBS concordance to the Good News Bible. Each head word in the concordance is glossed into the target language. The verses where the equivalent word(s) can be found are then automatically indexed under that head word and the word where it appears in each verse is highlighted. The example here shows a Kikuyu concordance which has been created in this way. Once the Automatic process is finished the editors can then refine the output until they are happy with the results. The pages are then typeset directly from the Concordance Builder files ready for printing.