For biblical terms that are used in a lot of questions and have more than one rendering, it can sometimes be advantageous to define a rule that can override the default rendering for some questions. This is most likely to be helpful when the renderings represent different surface forms and the correct form can be fairly consistently inferred from nearby words. You might find other useful cases, such as when a term has two different senses and nearby words can be used to guess at which sense is meant in a question. Defining rendering selection rules requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of the target vernacular as well as the ability to think abstractly. In some cases it might also require the ability to write a well-formed regular expression. If your team does not have anyone with these skills, do not worry. Transcelerator can still be used successfully without defining any rendering selection rules. However, if you find that translators are frequently having to select different default renderings, you can try to see if a rule can simplify their job.
Since rendering selection rules are used only to select the default rendering, it is not necessary to define them strictly in a way that they can never result in an undesirable selection. As long as they successfully select the correct rendering most of the time, they can be considered helpful. This will become clear in some of the examples below.
To work with rendering selection rules, on the Advanced menu, select Biblical Terms Rendering Selection Rules.
In the Biblical Terms Rendering Selection Rules dialog box, do any of the following:
When using the Create/Edit Rendering Selection Rule dialog box to define a rule, there are two parts to the process:
Note: When you select Term is immediately preceded by a specific word or Term is immediately followed by a specific word, Transcelerator shows a drop-down list with all the words used in any question. You can begin to type the word you have in mind, and Transcelerator will filter the list of words to show only words that start with the letters you have typed. Although you can type any word you want, if it is not one of the words in the existing list, the rule will not apply (unless you add custom questions later that use the word).
The English suffix -ing makes one of the inflected forms of verbs, used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. In Spanish, the equivalent suffix for -ar verbs is -ando; for -er and -ir verbs it is -iendo. There are a few English words that end in ing (e.g., king) that are not inflected verbs and which may be key biblical terms, and there are a few Spanish words that end in ndo (e.g., mando) that are not instances of the -ando or -iendo suffix. However, these are relatively rare and are not very likely to result in an incorrect selection for any pair of words in the two languages. A single rule that matches an English biblical term ending in ing and then chooses a vernacular (Spanish) verb ending in ndo (which covers both suffixes and also works for some irregular verbs) can be defined as follows:
The English prefix un- means not, giving negative or opposite force in adjectives and their derivative adverbs and nouns. In Malayalam, the equivalent prefix is അ-. There are a few English words that begin with un (e.g., universe) that are not instances of the prefix un- which may be key biblical terms, and there are a many Malayalam words that begin with അ (e.g., അകം) that are not instances of the prefix അ-. Sometimes the only way to find out whether a rule will prove useful is to try it. A rule that matches an English biblical term beginning with un and then chooses a vernacular (Malayalam) word beginning with അ can be defined as follows:
The biblical term “silver” can be used to refer specifically to the metal silver or more generically to money. In German, the word for the metal silver is Silber, but the word for money is Geld. When the term is used in the expression “silver cup”, the correct German translation is “silberner Becher”. Although there are a few other biblical terms in Transcelerator’s questions that are followed by the word cup (e.g., Pharaoh’s), there is no prefix or suffix that would help select the correct rendering, nor does not there seem to be any general rule at all. In this case, we can define a rule that matches an English biblical term followed by cup and then chooses the literal word silberner if it is one of the renderings. (In the case of “Pharaoh’s cup”, silberner will not be one of the renderings for “Pharaoh”, so the rule simply won't apply.) This rule can be defined as follows:
Note: In this case the "regular expression" is merely a literal word. No special regular expression syntax is used. This expression would also match any other renderings that contained the word silberner, so if there were other inflected forms with prefixes or suffixes, the most common one would be selected. To ensure an exact match, you could type \bsilberner\b or ^silberner$ instead.
Following on from the previous German example, if the target vernacular were Spanish, a more complex rule could be used to ensure that plata, the Spanish word for silver, is selected in cases where that is the desired sense, rather than dinero, meaning money. In addition to the above expression, the expressions “gold and silver”, “gold, silver” and “silver coin(s)” in English should result in the selection of plata as the best default rendering for silver. This rule can be defined as follows:
The base number for nouns in both English and Spanish is singular, and the plural forms in both languages involves the addition of an -s suffix. So it is quite simple to write a suffix-suffix rule to prefer a rendering that ends in s when the English biblical term ends in an s. However, for cases where the default rendering of a biblical term is the plural form the word, it could be useful to have a rule that selects the singular form when the English term appears to be singular. This rule can be defined as follows:
Hint: As illustrated here, the English term corresponding to the {0} will be the uninflected form, so typing a trailing \b (word boundary) ensures that no suffix is added. To allow for other suffixes but not a final suffix ending in s, you could instead type {0}.*[^s]\b.
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