Silas in Spanish

[SatiacoB]

I am working with South America with Spanish speaking nationals who do
not know English. Is there a version of Silas for them, and for use on
Spanish versions of Word? (And might there be a way to use this in
OpenOffice Writer, for those who don't use Word?)

[JimH]

On Mar 15, 1:56 pm, SatiacoB <kdi...@comcast.net> wrote:
> I am working with South America with Spanish speaking nationals who do
> not know English. Is there a version of Silas for them, and for use on
> Spanish versions of Word?
>

SILAS should work in Spanish versions of Word. We fixed a problem with
chapter numbers in the page headers in version 2.207-1.02. Try your
version
of SILAS on a Spanish version of Word and let us know if anything
doesn't
work.

So SILAS should work properly in that version of Word, but the menu
names
and menu items and the messages dialogs are all in English. If you
would
like to translate the messages into Spanish, you could do so, and I
could
distribute the Spanish version after we get it tested and working
properly.
That would be quite a bit or work. Dave Coombs made the same request
in
2007, but he didn't have time to work on it then. He did translate
some
messages, however, as an experiment, and we produced a test version of
SILAS
that had Spanish error messages in one small area -- creating a cover
document. I sent that test version to Dave and to John Wagner.

Most of the messages that would need to be translated are scattered
throughout the macros, but we have moved some of them into a separate
macro
module called "Strings". Here are three items from the Strings module:

Public Const strMakeCoverDoc_PrematureTitle = _
"Silas Error: Not formatted for Booklet printing yet "
Public Const strMakeCoverDoc_PrematurePrompt = _
"Sorry, you need to make a title page" & vbCr & _
" before you can make it into a cover document." & vbCr & vbCr & _
"Please open the Scripture menu and do the task:" & vbCr & _
vbTab & "2. Format For Half-Page Booklets" & vbCr & _
"and then run me again."
Public Const strMakeCoverDoc_NoPageBreakTitle = _
"Silas Error: No page break found "

Here is the translation of those three messages, that Dave sent back:

Public Const strMakeCoverDoc_PrematureTitle As String = _
"Error de Silas: No está formateado todavía para poder imprimir el
librito (o folleto) "
Public Const strMakeCoverDoc_PrematurePrompt As String = _
"Lo siento, primero usted tiene que preparar la contracarátula" &
vbCr & _
" antes de convertirla en un archivo de carátula." & vbCr & vbCr &
_
"Favor de abrir el menu Escritura y completar esa tarea:" & vbCr &
_
vbTab & "2. Format For Half-Page Booklets" & vbCr & _
"y después podrá reiniciar este paso."
Public Const strMakeCoverDoc_NoPageBreakTitle As String = _
"Error d Silas: No se encontró una división para una nueva página"

The idea is that you would translate the text between double-quote
characters (") without changing anything else, and send the file back
to me.
I would then replace the English module with the Spanish module and
make the
new Spanish version. Someone would also need to remake all the menu
entries
and dialogs with Spanish equivalents.

There are also some Word documents that would need to be translated.

Dave Coombs and John Wagner might still be interested in working on
this project with you, and the three of you might have time to get the
job done. Tim Sissel also wrote to me about the idea, and might have
time to help.

If you would like to try the test version that we did in 2007, I could
make
the equivalent Spanish version for whatever version of SILAS you are
using
now. What version is that?

>(And might there be a way to use this in
> OpenOffice Writer, for those who don't use Word?)
>

What version of Paratext are you using?

Paratext 7 contains Print Draft, which will export a book from
Paratext and
produce a PDF file, ready to print. While you are asking Print Draft
to do
that, you can tell it to do single-column or double-column formatting,
the
paper-size to use and what font and size to use. There are not many
things
that need to be specified, and it remembers the settings for the
project, so
you might find Print Draft a better way to go for the Spanish
translators.
Print Draft can even insert pictures automatically, provided the
translators
are happy with the picture placement that it does, namely always the
full
column, or spanning two columns.

It would be a lot of work to translate the SILAS macros to OpenOffice
Writer, and we have been asked to use "Pathway" for the major
formatting
control with export to OpenOffice Writer. (Pathway is a program that
can
format text from FLEX or Paratext using parameters specified in CSS
files
(Cascading Style Sheets) and adjust it for Open Office or InDesign or
mobile
phone or the web. You can read about it and download it at
http://silpathway.wordpress.com/
To use it for Scripture, make sure that you download a version that
mentions
Paratext.)

Let me know if any of you would be interested in translating SILAS
into
Spanish, or any other language for that matter.

Jim

[SatiacoB]

Glad you have been thinking about it and that it can work with Spanish
Word. But what if I've got an English version of Word with a Spanish
helper working with me? Can I choose to have the Spanish version of
Silas?

As for translating the rest of it, like the others it sounds like too
big of a project for me to work on. We all have to many projects we'd
like to do, don't we.

I started to look at them in the macro code. It's going to take some
time to pick out what needs to be changed. I tried to get a look at
the menu items (in Wd2003) to see about changing those also, but once
I turn on customize those menu items disappear - how would I get them
visible to work on? Oh, but the person I want to help is using W2007 -
oh, well.

[JimH]

On Mar 24, 1:47 pm, SatiacoB <kdi...@comcast.net> wrote:

> Glad you have been thinking about it and that it can work with Spanish
> Word. But what if I've got an English version of Word with a Spanish
> helper working with me? Can I choose to have the Spanish version of
> Silas?
>

As I understand it, from Windows XP onwards, you can run any language-
version of Word on any language-version of Windows, and it'll work
properly. What happens when the Locale is set to something other than
English, you find that the separator character used in the Find
command is no longer "," but something else, perhaps ";".
SILAS copes with these differences by specifying the locale's
separator instead of ",", in likes like these:
' .Text = "([0-9]{1,})"
.Text = "([0-9]{1" & Application.International(wdListSeparator) &
"})"
The first line is commented out, so it has no effect. It is there as a
comment to explain what the second line does. The comma in the English
code is replaced by
Application.International(wdListSeparator)

So I think you should be able to use any Spanish version that might be
produced in future on an English system as well as you would on a
Spanish system.

> As for translating the rest of it, like the others it sounds like too
> big of a project for me to work on. We all have to many projects we'd
> like to do, don't we.
>

Are you using Paratext 7 as your scripture editor?

If so, does your Spanish-speaking coworker handle the Spanish
interface OK?
(Use Tools->Options to set the language of the interface.)

When you change Paratext 7 to Spanish interface, how does your
colleague handle
Archivo->Imprimir borrodor
to use the PDF output script, which is known as PrintDraft in English?
Then there would be no need to use Word, nor to translate SILAS to
Spanish.

> I started to look at them in the macro code. It's going to take some
> time to pick out what needs to be changed.
>

I think it would be best for someone to go through all the strings in
the macros and for each one
* make a named variable and put it in the Strings module,
* move the string in there, and
* replace the string in the macro with the name of the variable in the
Strings module.

Then someone would need to translate the variables in the Strings
module into Spanish.

> I tried to get a look at
> the menu items (in Wd2003) to see about changing those also, but once
> I turn on customize those menu items disappear - how would I get them
> visible to work on?
>

The trick is to look at the bottom of the Customize dialog and tell it
to save the changes in the template Silas.dot instead of in
Normal.dot.

> Oh, but the person I want to help is using W2007 -
> oh, well.
>

Word 2007 must have a way of customizing menus, but I would find it
easier to do it in Word 2003. Then I would make the Spanish version,
and you could install it on the Word 2007 machine and it should all
work properly.

But try using Paratext with the Spanish interface, and then show your
colleague how to use
Archivo->Imprimir borrodor
and see if that provides good enough printouts for his purposes.

Jim