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Software Applications

The following software applications are some of the Bible translation tools that are under development or modification. This will give you an idea of how your development skills match what we need. Please note that most of the software is free and can be downloaded from the Internet.

A complete listing of software to support the work of fieldworkers can be seen at SIL Software Catalog.

Scripture Checking Tools - A suite of tools that will check various aspects of scripture text. This ranges from all chapters/verses, to consistency in translation of words, parallel passages, etc.
Graphite - A non-Roman scripting engine and compiler to create fonts for minority languages. Click on Graphite for more information. This has actually been used in Mozilla (see Mozdev)
Open Office for Complex Scripts - SIL has been working to integrate Graphite into Open Office and has an effort underway to make this happen with the hope that the community will embrace this work. (See Graphite in Open Office)
Translators Workplace - A collection of many different linked Exegetical resources on two CDs. Translators Workplace is currently moving to the Libronix environment and converting documents from a Folio to a Libronix form. (with agreement from Libronix makers of LOGOS software to do this). (See LOGOS)
LinguaLinks Library - A collection of many different linked resources on a CD that explains how to proceed with language project tasks. See LinguaLinks These resources are also being ported to Libronix.
FieldWorks Data Notebook - A tool that allows language project team members to capture and annotate many kinds of information that must be collected to do translation (See FieldWorks Data Notebook)
FieldWorks Translation Editor - An editor that allows translators to enter their translation in the context of their linguistic data. (See FieldWorks Translation Editor)
FieldWorks Language Explorer - A series of tools that helps analyze texts, create a lexicon, interlinearize and other tasks. (See FieldWorks Language Explorer)
CARLA - Computer Aided Related Language Adaptation - A suite of tools that does a first pass translation based on entered rules for related languages. (See CARLA) CARLA includes several of the applications including the PATR programs, PARSE.(See PC-PATR)
WeSay - A mother tongue oriented application to help collect lexical data used in building dictionaries and researching a language. (See WeSay)
OurWord - A mother tongue oriented application developed by the Seed Company and used to draft Scripture. (See OurWord)
BART - Biblical Analysis Research Tool - A tool that allows tagging of original language texts to show higher level grammatical contexts (discourse for instance).
Speech Tools - Tools that allow analysis and playback of sound recordings. This tool allows analysis of phonetic observations and is moving into doing more phonological analysis. (For earlier versions see Speech Analyzer, Speech Manager, IPA help at - Speech Tools)
Paratext - Paratext is a translation editing tool developed at SIL by United Bible Societies (UBS). (See Paratext)
Translation Notes Editor - Actually developed by UBS but with some support by SIL - A tool that allows the capture and retrieval of notes associated with translation decisions.
LinguaLinks - A suite of lexical tools. (See LinguaLinks)
WordSurv - A survey tool being developed by Taylor University in conjunction with SIL International. (See WordSurv and SIL Software Catalog)
PalmSurv - A handheld program that allows wordlist collection and sharing to gather data that will be used in programs like WordSurv which is built to do comparative analysis between languages. (See PalmSurv)
WordPad- An editor that supports complex non-Roman scripts and utilizes Graphite. (See WordPad)

FieldWorks

FieldWorks is an umbrella suite of tools that will incorporate the sound based software as well as linguistics tools and translation tools to help language projects to manage, track, analyze and publish materials necessary to support translation teams in an integrated fashion. The software development process is being refined and is based on eXtreme Programming (XP).

Most Applications are Developed in:

C++ or C# though some development has been done in visual Basic.

Visual Studio .Net is used for the development environment.

XML and XSLTs are foundational to several import and export mechanisms.

UML is used to define our database scheme which is implemented using MSDE (basically Microsoft SQL Server) and a process has been defined to automate the creation of the actual database.

XML is used on an expermintal basis to actually drive some of the User interface as well.

Mono and FireBird are used to port our FieldWorks application, WeSay, and OurWord to the Linux platform at the Linux Division (in Canada) and in the development team in Thailand who are making good progress.

SIL is targeting some of the low power devices for the mother tongue oriented applications. It is a very exciting time as our tools mature and are beginning to have wide exposure and acceptance.

Plone an open source content management system is also used.

Linguistic Papers

For further information, here are some papers that have been presented that reflect our software directions:

Larry S. Hayashi and John Hatton, Combining UML. XML and relational database technologies - the best of all worlds for robust linguistic databases
Dick Troyer, 2008-08-20
Download "23.3.hayashi.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 95KB [467 downloads]

Richmond H. Thomason, Representing and Reasoning in Computer-Readable Field Linguistics Archives
Dick Troyer, 2008-08-20
Download "Thomason.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 122KB [396 downloads]

Last year, there were also papers presented which can be found at:

Eric S. Albright, Design of an Electronic Method for Describing Writing Systems

Peter Constable, Phonetic Fonts and Phonetic Data Encoding

Peter Constable, Unicode Character Encoding of Archived Linqistic Data

Sharon Correll, Extensible Rendering Technology for Web-based Data Access
Dick Troyer, 2008-08-20
Download "correll.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 144KB [366 downloads]

Mike Maxwell, Creating Morphological Data: From Markup to Generalizations

Gary F. Simons, Language identification in metadata descriptions of language archive holdings

David J. Weber, Workshop on Web-Based Language Documentation and Description
Dick Troyer, 2008-08-20
Download "weber.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 53KB [344 downloads]