ER++: Extending Enhanced Resources for Translator Understanding

Translators need to understand many things that are traditionally locked up in inaccessible scholarly materials. Translation consultants often provide a bridge to scholarship and its insights on biblical culture, worldview, biblical languages and linguistics, history, and geography. Both translation teams and translation consultants need easy ways to find the right information for translating a given passage.

Enhanced resources in Paratext provide a framework for delivering “just in time” information that explains a passage using images, maps, simple lexicons, and short articles. Enhanced Resources++ (ER++) extends this approach by creating a community-centered repository for media and resources, a curation system to allow groups to choose the best resources for their needs, and open access for other software systems. The focus is on media to help explain the material culture, natural environment, geography, and other aspects of the biblical world. ER++ organizes this media by linking to the biblical text, so it can be accessed directly when relevant during translation, as well as using other metadata to support search and finding related items.

ER++ builds on alignments from Bible translations in strategic languages in order to unlock enhanced resources for translators who don’t know biblical languages. This strategy requires alignments in many languages of wider communication, along with tools to create them. Through ER++, Clear is working with numerous other partners to collect and organize media and alignments in centralized repositories, build prototype systems to showcase this data, and build interfaces for others to contribute media, alignments, and more.