The basic project setup consists of two steps:

  1. Define the name, type, language and tags.
  2. Describe the Sections and Passages.

Define the type, language and tags

SIL Transcriber has two types: Scripture projects and General projects. Scripture projects sync with Paratext (both pushing to and pulling from) and General do not. Scripture projects have a book name as part of the reference and General projects do not. Scripture projects are frequently named for the book of which they are transcriptions. General projects have no real convention concerning their names.

The language specifies the language of the content of the transcription. Tags are used to describe if the project is just for testing or if it is a back translation project. You are free to add other tags that are useful to you and these tags will appear on the project cards.

Describe the Sections and Passages

The project advanced settings allows you to call the Sections by other names if the word Sections isn’t particularly helpful in describing the content you will be transcribing. The ‘Section’ represents the work assigned to a transcriber in a team project. (Sometimes it is helpful if multiple audio files that are related are assigned to the same transcriber so that transcriptions are consistent in relationship to the content.)

There are two methods for adding the ‘plan’ describing the sections and passages. You can either use SIL Transcriber to create them using the add buttons or you can create a spreadsheet in Excel and copy and paste it into SIL Transcriber. Some projects have a spreadsheet they are using for their project description in Excel so this sheet can be “shared” with SIL Transcriber to describe the project in the same way. A much more detailed description of how to setup Sections and passages is described in the help file here.

Here is a video of setting up a project.