I’m managing our project remotely with a security sensitive team in Asia. Our MTTs are trying to re-record mistakes on verses in HT desktop 2.2.15, but are confused and stuck. In trying to help them remotely, it seems HT does not display verse numbers but only blocks of text. They have found mistakes in their Genesis recording in various verses, but in order to rerecord a mistake in a verse, do they have to re-record the entire block of relevant texts? For example, Genesis 1:1-5 is block 3/9 for our Genesis chapter one. If they have a mistake in verse 2, do they need to re-record the entire block (verses 1-5)? We are new to HT and it does not seem possible to re-record a specific verse but only blocks of text. Thanks for any help for the newbies on HT!
HearThis does display which verse(s) a block of text corresponds to. (I’m pretty sure that was true back in v. 2.2.15, but that was a long time ago, so perhaps not.) However, HearThis presents individual sentences as blocks to record. So if you have a sentence that goes on for multiple verses, the team would need to re-record the entire sentence. There is no way inside HearThis to re-record just a part of a block. Since you mention this is in Asia and since it seems somewhat unlikely that all of GEN 1:1-5 would be a single sentence, I’m wondering if perhaps this is a “scriptio continua” language. If so, and if the translation uses any kind of space characters (regular space, zero-width or thin space, etc.) to subtly mark the ends of sentences, I would definitely suggest that the team upgrade to the latest version of HearThis. I added support for specifying whitespace characters as sentence delimiters last year. If that is not your situation and you can give me any other information about why you have such long sentences or how it might reasonably be broken up into more manageable blocks for recording, I’d love to try to understand your needs better.
HearThis does have a feature for recording long blocks in two distinct chunks and then putting them together. It is also possible to add additional punctuation to be used for breaking the text into blocks. Though there are some possible “gotchas” with this if the project is already partially recorded,
By the way, the latest version of HearThis also has some improved tools that will probably help you (and or the local administrator for the project) with the job of detecting where the text and the recordings have gotten out of sync. So if upgrading is at all feasible, please consider doing so.
Thanks so much for your detailed help Tom. Our language is “scriptio continua” in that it does not use space but vertical lines to end a phrase. It is a clause chaining language with the matrix verb at the end of the clause chains marking the end of the related clauses. I tried to replicate our in-country team’s problem by installing the latest desktop version (3.30). This made things worse, for example, for Genesis chapter 1 it only displays verse 1-5a in the block for chapter 1. With 3.30 I cannot view any verse numbers within the block of text. Then when clicking the right arrow it brings me to Genesis 2. This is the same for other OT books as well (I tested this in Leviticus). Due to our security needs, our goal is to record the entire OT, use the HT files in partnership with FCBH to produce an Audio Bible. Our local team is very talented with their language and their iphones, with years of experience in translation, but this one has us all scratching our heads. They want to re-record their mistakes in Genesis, but are stuck with re-recording a block of text, not individual verses. Any help would be appreciated. You can email me if you want more details about our language. Thanks in advance from your community newbies!
Can you tell me the Unicode codepoint of the vertical line character you use? HearThis has a built-in list of sentence-ending punctuation characters that covers most of the worlds scripts, but if your scriptuses the ordinary vertical bar | character or perhaps some other character that Unicode does not consider to be a standard sentence-ending character (or perhaps one which was added to Unicode more recently that HearThis doesn’t know about), then it might be necessary to add that character to the list of phrase-ending punctuation in HearThis. If, on the other hand, Genesis 1:1-5a really is one big phrase and there are no vertical bars until you get into verse 5, then this is definitely an unusual situation. I just installed HearThis 2.2.15, and from what I see, that version also does not display individual verse numbers in the text, just the range of verse numbers included in the current block, so I’m puzzled by what you’re saying about how 3.3.0 made it worse. I understand the security situation, so if you need to email me with more details, screenshots, etc. you can write to tom_bogle@sil.org. If you can, add me as an Observer to your Paratext project, or if this is recording project is based on a glyssenscript, email me a copy of that script. That will make it easier for me to see what is going on and hopefully be able to offer more useful help.