Introduction

previous lesson: Send and Receive next lesson: Keeping Track of Biblical Term Renderingsthis lesson in video format:  Lesson 5 videos

Where Are We?

In the last lesson, we learned how to share projects with send and receive. This lesson presupposes that you have been added to the project as a translator or consultant. We will now learn how to take notes during a checking session.

 

Why is this important?

Every consultant needs to document his or her recommendations to the team. After the checking session, a checking report is drawn up. The report is both for the benefit of the translation team so that they can verify that they have taken into account all of the advice of the consultant. But this report is also sent to a supervisor or translation coordinator. This provides accountability so that if questions about the translation arise later, it is possible to go back and consult the reports to see what the consultant recommended.

 

What are we going to do?

We will take some notes as if we were in a checking session. When the checking session is finished, we will copy the notes into a consultant report. Later we will check to see if the team has actually resolved the issues or not.

 

Review

Restore the saved window arrangement from the previous lesson. Click on Windows and activate Stacked 2 Collumns if it is not already active (check mark beside it). Add the project PLKJV to your desktop and save the combination.

 

Exercise 1: Mark a point in the project history

Activate the PLKJV window by clicking in it. Now click on the Project menu and select Mark Point in Project History. Write: “Beginning checking of Matthew, Day 1”

 

Exercise 2: Taking Notes

Take a chapter at random in Matthew for adding notes. Make sure that each person in your group is working on a different chapter.

Go to verse 2 of your chapter in the King James Latin version, select a single word in the text and insert a note in one of three ways:

3 Ways to Insert a Note 
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+N 2. Right-click the selected text and choose the first option Insert Note 3. Go to the Insert menu and choose Insert Note

For the text of the notes write, “the back translator doesn't understand this word”

Click OK and see how the red flag appears in the text.

Now go to verse 3 and select a phrase consisting of several words. Insert the following note:

“According to the back translator this expression is not natural”

Now go to verse 4. This time, your comment has to do with the entire verse. Place your cursor at the beginning of the verse directly after the verse number. Insert a note that says:

“This verse needs to be restructured”

 

Exercise 3: Sharing Your Notes with the Team

In your table groups, do Send and Receive with your team members. Check to see if the other people have received your notes and if theirs have come to you. If you hover the cursor over the red flag, the note will display.

 

Exercise 4: Create the Consultant Report

(This tutorial was first written for Paratext 7.4, and described an option called the Notes report. Now in Paratext 7.5 you can do filtering and sorting of notes in the Notes List window. If you have Paratext 7.4, and want to see the old way, go to this page: Exercise+4+-+the+old+way)

When reporting on the consultant session, it could be useful to have a list of all the notes made during the session. You can get this from the Paratext Notes List window.

Go to File > Open Notes and select the PLKJV project. This will open a Notes List window for that project. By default, the Notes List window only shows unresolved notes in the current chapter, so you may not see any notes in the list. 

To show all notes, click on the top left list box and choose All Notes.

To show notes for the current book you are in, click on the middle list box and choose Current book. 

If you wanted to select more than one book, or a range of chapters within a book, you could click Choose verses from the bottom of that list, and select a range of chapters and verses, or if you chose the books tab, you could choose the books you wanted to include. 

You could create your own filter by clicking on New Filter in the drop down list at top left. For instance, this filter would show just the notes created in December 2013. 

 

You can also use the search bar to filter notes by a word found in them. For instance, one can find the notes where the back translator is mentioned by typing back translator in the search bar.

If you want to copy the list of notes from your Notes List window into another document, make sure your Notes List is the active window in Paratext. Then go to the Edit menu, and choose Copy All Notes. Then go to your other document and paste. Copy All Notes does not copy all notes in the project, but all the notes that currently meet your filter. If you want every note in the project, set your filtering so nothing is excluded -- choose All notes in the lefthand list, and All books in the second list. 

The Copy Selected Note command lets you copy one individual note. To select a note, click on it in the list window. When selected it will have a black frame around it.

Note: if your notes use a right to left script, it is recommended you use Microsoft Word to paste the notes into. You may need to set the font, font size and text direction in the document before you paste the notes.

If you have not configured Microsoft Word for right to left text, this page from Microsoft may be helpful.

Office support: Right to left language features

 

Advanced notes features

Assigning notes

While inserting a new project note or adding a comment to an or existing note, you can assign it to any user who has a role on the project (except an Observer), as follows: From the Assign To drop-down list:

Assign the note to yourself if the note is a personal reminder that does not require a response from other team members.

Assign the note to another user if you need to ask a question or request a change.

Assign the note to (Team) if other team members need to review it before a team meeting.

Leave the note assigned to (Unassigned) if you do not want to assign it to anyone.

Click OK.

If the Reply to Project Notes option is selected (in Tools > Options), when you add a comment to a note which is assigned to you, the note will be automatically assigned back to the user who assigned it to you.

 

Additional types of notes

Tired of red flags? The project administrator can define note tags to indicate notes that are for a different purpose than the default To-Do tag (for example: a reminder to self; or information that does not require action). These note types are defined per project.

The settings for the following are found in Projects | Project Properties and Settings under the Notes tab.

 

Add Tag

Click the Add Tag button to add a new type of note which will be identified by a different icon.

Choose the icon you would like for the new note tag

 

Restricted Resolve

The project administrator can apply a “restricted resolve” setting to a note tag, so that the only person who can resolve a note with that tag is the person who inserted it or the administrator.

Just check the box for Restricted Resolve if you want this.

Templates
If you have standard text that you want to include in every note as a template for your remarks, add the text in the template column. It can contain multiple lines as in this example: