How It Works

Transcelerator presents a translator with a list of comprehension questions in English or other installed language of wider communication and allows manual translations of those questions to be entered. As work progresses, Transcelerator uses the growing body of translated questions and previously identified target-language renderings of biblical terms to make statistics-based guesses to fill in drafts of translations for remaining questions.

Questions having very similar frames (e.g., “What did x say to y?”) generally result in “instant” translations of questions with a very high degree of reliability.

Getting Started

After installing Transcelerator, restart Paratext. If you have properly associated your Paratext project with the appropriate keyboard for entering vernacular text, this same keyboard will be activated when translating questions in Transcelerator. For best results, select the Major Biblical Terms list as the current list for the project.

To run Transcelerator, first open the desired project (not a reference project) in Paratext. Open the menu for that project and on the Tools menu click Transcelerator. Note: the menu icon is in the upper left corner of the title bar for the project window.

In Paratext 8 or earlier, when you start Transcelerator, it will load questions for the currently active project, so make sure that the active project is the Scripture translation you want to work on. To run Transcelerator, on Paratext’s Tools menu, click Transcelerator.

The first time Transcelerator opens for a particular Paratext project, it will take a little extra time to do some one-time initialization. After that, it will open more quickly.

By default, Transcelerator initially tries to display the list of questions sorted so that the questions at the top are the ones that will give you “the most bang for the buck”. If you start translating from the top down, you will probably find that you will quickly start to make pretty good progress with the help of Transcelerator’s automated translation guessing logic. The longer and “harder” questions to translate will sort closer to the bottom of the list. Of course, you can translate the questions in any order and Transcelerator will do its best to learn as you work. If you want to sort the questions in some other order, you can click a column heading to sort on that column.

More Help

The full set Transcelerator Help system is available in the wiki.

Helpful Video

See the video, Transcelerator Lightning Talk for APLTW. (Note that this is now a little dated, as it shows how to run Transcelerator from within an older version of Paratext.)