Languages -- Where are they?

I hate to post a criticism, as my first post, but hopefully it will do some good.

Why are the scriptures only available online in two languages (English and Spanish)? The text is already digitized for Portuguese, French, and Italian at minimum, because I personally possess these texts -- those languages are on the scripture CD the Church produced. I'm sure that in reality the text is in digital form for most and probably all in-print translations of the BoM and Selections from the BoM, due to modern publishing and printing practice. Why not just upload these texts? Gradually add all the fancy footnoting and stuff later.

If I were a Japanese member of the Church, I'd probably be pretty baffled that with thousands of active Japanese members, and a culture very much into technology, that the Church has not deemed it a priority to put the scriptures online in my language!

If I were an investigator who speaks Portuguese, or German, or anything other than English or Spanish, I cannot find so much as the Joseph Smith's Testimony pamphlet online from the Church. Faith cometh by hearing; if the basic material isn't there, how is anyone going to believe it? I think it's great the translations the Church has done on Mormon.org, but mormon.org really only gives a very cursory and simple introduction to Church beliefs. A serious investigator will be able to read everything of substance on mormon.org in maybe 5 minutes, and then spend the next 5 hours reading lots of anti-mormon sites which, conveniently enough, are available in many many languages.

So, my question is: are there any plans in the works to get the scriptures and other fundamental outreach materials online in other languages any time soon? It was great (and to me, a surprise) that Spanish finally got done, but it came along about 5 years after the English, IIRC. How long do we have before Portuguese gets done? Mandarin? Urdu?

Language materials are currently available at http://www.lds.org/languages/ or by clicking Languages on the top of LDS.org. Scriptures are currently available in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. If you click "English" in the top-right corner of the Scriptures page you will get a drop-down of other languages. I personally think this menu could be improved to be more intuitive for the users, but it is available.

OK, reading through the forum, and being linked over to ldsWebguy.com, I have learned:

1. Maybe my question is more content-related than this forum is supposed to be.

2. A few days ago German, French, and Italian were added!!!!

So that's great! That indicates that we probably will not have to wait another 5 years for Portuguese, 20 years for Russian, etc. It indicates also that the Church wants to do it "all or nothing" and not release scripture online in any language until it is all footnoted, properly formatted, and fitted in with the universal scripture URL scheme (which is very cool by the way). So that's definitely no trivial task, as putting up the text would be. Which I still think should be done, since text is a better alternative then nothing. So that's kind of technical and thus on-topic for the forum! I hope!

If anyone here does have the inside scoop on the plan/schedule for rolling out other languages, though, I would be very interested.

KGThunder, we cross-posted (you posted while I was typing), so yeah, I just learned that over at ldsWebguy.com, but thanks!

I knew about the /languages portal you mention, of course, which has dozens of languages. Unfortunately it's not geared towards outreach at all. You can get General Conference talks and the Liahona in everything from Swahili to Ukrainian, but not Joseph Smith's Testimony, the Articles of Faith, the Book of Mormon, or anything like that. Which seems kind of odd.

From the What's New document on LDS.org:

Languages. This Language link provides a list of the materials in other languages available on LDS.org today. Later this year, LDS.org will be translated into nine more languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. At that time, this language link will change the language for the entire site. Over the next several months, we will add materials to the Gospel Library in 32 additional languages.

Hopefully when the site is translated into these other languages, the materials you are hoping for will be included.

Portuguese is in the works. Here is what you have to understand. Just to post the text of the scriptures into some language is not really feasible. Every time we want to publish a language online, it has to be read word-for-word by a committee of native speakers (around the world) to ensure that it is 100% accurate. Not all of the scriptures in other languages lend themselves to HTML markup and so a lot of errors are introduced in the conversion which have to be found and fixed. These committees are responsible for reading the scriptures after they have been marked up and comparing them word for word with the printed version. This all has to be done under the direction of a department of the Church which has to facilitate these meetings with the readers. It is very time consuming and costly. So because of this, we try to pick the languages that will hit the largest # of users AND be the easiest to do. I can assure you, however, that we are moving forward with making this happen.

Tom

Thanks so much for the info, Brother Tom!

Would it be possible to post the PDF files from which the physical versions of the scriptures are printed? They are, no doubt printed from such files, or postscript I should say, which is easily converted into PDF. That way, it would be identical to the printed version, and the only errors possible would be errors that show up in the printed version as well.

reachtheworld wrote:Thanks so much for the info, Brother Tom!

Would it be possible to post the PDF files from which the physical versions of the scriptures are printed? They are, no doubt printed from such files, or postscript I should say, which is easily converted into PDF. That way, it would be identical to the printed version, and the only errors possible would be errors that show up in the printed version as well.

That is out of my jurisdiction but I'll pass the suggestion over to the proper department. Please tell me the advantage of having them in PDF. Is this simply to have a portable electronic copy?

Tom

Wow, I can't believe it! That is so great! Thank you.

The advantage is just, well, outreach! It's the same reason the Jehovah's Witnesses have the Watchtower and their outreach materials available online in a kazillion languages. The Church has done amazingly well providing foreign language material geared to members of the Church, but not-so-well in providing outreach materials geared to investigators. It's kind of backwards in a way.

Here's some examples of how it would be incredibly good and useful:

So that some guy in Iran that speaks Urdu who is browsing online for information about the Book of Mormon can find it and read it. Sure, he could have a paper one shipped over, but it's more effective to give people the message through the media they are already using. So if they're looking on the internet, which more and more people are, they can get the message via that medium. Plus, it is easier and more convenient; getting the physical book is a big pain in comparison. In the hypothetical above, for instance, it could possibly cause major (life-threatening) difficulties shipping a paper Book of Mormon into Iran.

Or maybe a missionary in Florida has just run into a Urdu man who is very interested and though he can speak and understand English, he cannot read English. Rather than ordering an Urdu BoM from distribution, who will then ship it whenever they feel like it, book rate, and then finally receiving it a month later, how much nicer to just be able to print it off the Church web site!

All in all, it just would be a great resource for missionary work. We're trying to get the word out there, and this would, well, literally "get the word out there".

The advantage of having it in PDF format in particular, is simply that:

1. It is a fairly universal format on the internet, so most everyone w/ a computer will be able to read it.
2. Postscript/PDF has become the default standard in the publishing industry since most all printers use postscript (no one wants to mess with non-computerized imprints and stuff like that any more. You might as well go back to setting type by hand like Gutenburg!)
3. So, I'm fairly sure the Church has the Korean BoM, the Ukrainian BoM, all these BoMs already sitting on computers somewhere either in postscript or readily postscriptable. And to convert (or "distill") from .ps to .pdf, you just use some distiller, like the free GhostScript program. So it makes it all easy!
4. This bypasses all need for legions of proofreaders until the man-power is available. Otherwise, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem for the languages with not many members. Like, there's not many Urdu-speaking LDS, I'd guess, and only a fraction of them available to proofread. So when will they get an online translation otherwise? Maybe in 20 years. Or 40. Or never.

Feel free to forward this post along to the proper dept. if you think it would help. Or is there someone I should contact directly? I'd assume they'd listen to you more than me, but maybe that assumption is incorrect.

Actually you have it a little backwards. We don't keep the scriptures in PDF format. They are converted to PDF format after they are converted to the Web format. These PDF files are proof-read because they are exactly what the web site will look like. Hope this clarifies the situation. I think for the mean time we need to order copies in the language that we want from the Dist. center.


Tom

Actually you have it a little backwards. We don't keep the scriptures in PDF format. They are converted to PDF format after they are converted to the Web format.

You are referring to the Web / Technical dept., right? I meant the Printing Dept. Unless I'm very much mistaken, Printing has files on computers that they use to print off the scriptures on ther big printing presses. It's the same process, kind of, as printing off a MS Word document from your home PC; their printer (actually printing press) is just much much bigger.

Even if they do not do this, which I think would fly in the face of publishing norms and be very surprising, posting PDFs would still be relatively easy. Just take the book, cut off the binding, scan it (there's machines that will automatically do this so you don't have to manually feed in each page), and then save it as a PDF. No OCR, no nothing, no potential for errors, just the raw images of the pages. There are even services which can do this for you, for a reasonable cost.

The whole point of this is to cut out any possibility for transmission errors or human errors. Thus eliminate the roadblocks to getting it online. The scanning-from-print idea adds a *very slight* possibility for error that distilling direct from the printing file doesn't have, but any errors could be easily caught by going through page by page (making sure the digital is visually the same as the physical, no pages are missing or smudged, etc.) by someone who doesn't even speak the language.

Should I call the printing dept. with this idea; is it more up their alley?

reachtheworld wrote:Should I call the printing dept. with this idea; is it more up their alley?

Yes, that is more up their alley.

Tom

Another difficulty in posting up in different languages is making sure that the indexing and searching is correct. If somebody searches on Nephi in English we want to make sure that the results that come back in Spanish are identical. With diacritics and other characters thrown in the mix it makes things rather interesting.

PDF
I see where reachtheworld is going with this and I agree that it is likely that the print/publishing office should have some version (ps or pdf) that would look Identical to the paper copy. Why cant that be taken and optimized for the web so that there is at least some access to the Book of Mormon in those less popular languages, while we are waiting for the HTML version. A pdf in this shape would be searchable through the pdf reader.

Scanned
I don't like the thought of scanned pdf's. They usually are pretty big files, and sometimes the machine errors and makes the pages crooked or feeds two pages at once etc... but still I guess it's better than nothing at all. Most Digital Copy Machines now will do this.

Update! Update!

So, after several phone calls, here is the situation.

Printing does have almost all the translations in digital form, though there are a *few* that are still on film only. Printing does not want to just release the undoctored pdf files because they have tick marks (for assembling the 16-page groups and binding the book together). And possibly other printing marks/info. So they feel that would be innappropriate to release the scriptures for download in such a form, and that's understandable. I suppose they might have to rearrange the page order too, now that I think about it.

According to the man I talked to, Ron S., they had gone the pdf route on some other documents, and it ends up taking just as long to clean up the pdf for release as it takes to just do it the right way.

Ron also let me know the rough schedule we're looking at for getting all the current translations of the scriptures online. They hope to have 30 or so online by the end of the year. WOW! And all of them up within two years. That's a far cry from the five year gap between English and Spanish. So by 2008 or 9, this will no longer be an issue. They're comfortable enough with the data conversion process now that they're not going to have the "legions of pre-release proofreaders" we've been stewing about -- they're going to let the *users* be the proofreaders. As in, just all the normal web surfers; if we find a typo or something, we submit it for correction. So I take it that's one reason it's going to start going a lot faster. They're starting with a core 12 languages which are the 12 most-used languages on the internet, and those should definitely be done by year-end 2007, as I understood Ron. The ten most common languages on the internet today are English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Italian, and either Russian or Arabic (this site says Arabic: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm , this one Russian: http://www.icef.com/bulletin/2007-02/07 ... ep_en.html ). So I guess we'll see those 11 first, plus one mystery player to round out the 12. Portuguese is the next in line for the Church, of course, and sensibly so because there are so many Portuguese Church members.

This is all part of a larger effort to move everything onto XML, so that they don't have to worry about document conversion ever again and will be ready for new publishing and typesetting techniques and technologies as they come along.

So now you know what's going on at the Printing Division of the Church!

I forgot to ask about the scanned-pdf option. But with such an accelerated time-schedule, it's not such a dire need, at least in my mind. They will be online soon, and then, happy day, all is well.

Dutchmen, your prospects also look bright, because http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/388B3FC7- ... 2651E2042/ puts the Dutch tenth on the top ten at 1.6 % of internet users. So:
English √ CHECK
Chinese
Japanese
Spanish √ CHECK
German √ CHECK
French √ CHECK
Brazilian Portuguese NEXT IN LINE
Korean
Italian √ CHECK
Russian
Arabic
Dutch

Those are the likely contenders for the first 12 languages that we will be being put on the internet.

Thanks for your great suggestions. Scriptures in languages is very important to us,and we are working on many more languages to post online. You'll see a new language added every month or two. As Tom mentioned below, we have to be very careful with the scriptures to be sure the content is 100% correct.

TOM
As I understand it, Italians have few church books etc. Can you walk me through
how to get the Gospel Library into ITALIAN ?

Tom is right, the Scriptures are not in PDF format. They are in a text format that is set up to be read in HTML and probably uses XML for formatting purposes online.

But having a page for page PDF format online where you could print a page or pages could be extremely useful. They already have printed overheads of pages from the Scriptures I've seen used for many years in CES classrooms, largely seminary and institute classes. When the teacher wants to show something in the scriptures, he/she pulls out the page from the instructor's kits for the lessons, then puts them on the overhead nad marks them up as he/she goes to show things about a particular scripture block to the students.

PDFs could allow a sunday school, YM, or any other instructor to pull a page and give it to the students during the class and they could follow along and mark that page up, then later if they wanted to add the work from that class done on that paper printed copy to their own scriptures their own way, they would have the 'class notes' so to speak.

I believe you could do that now generally with the HTML/XML pages, but having exact replicas of pages from the scriptures from PDFs would allow for some more enhanced things in the classroom.

TAR wrote:TOM
As I understand it, Italians have few church books etc. Can you walk me through
how to get the Gospel Library into ITALIAN ?

I wish I could answer your question. The Curriculum department is working with the translation department to translate content into various languages but I don't know their process or time frames.

Tom

Tom is right, the Scriptures are not in PDF format.

Um, I think we are talking past each other here. Not that it matters too much to me any more, now that I've figured out what's going on, but trying one more time:

Actually I was right (hope that doesn't sound prideful), the scriptures ARE in PDF format. Down at the Printing Division! Does that make sense? That's a simplification; actually they're in a format so trivially simple to convert to PDF that for all practical purposes you can consider them already being in PDF. From my conversation with Ron, it sounded like the Church uses Quark, specifically, if anyone is insatiably curious. All they'd have to do is press the magic button, so to speak, and poof! the PDF files would be created.

The problem is....

The problem is that the files you want the big huge printing press to read and the file you want the guy to read on his computer screen in Acrobat Reader are not necessarily exactly the same. Notably, the printing press file (which is what they have, right now, in Quark) has little tick marks to help in the assembly and binding of the books. Big deal, you say? Why not release them anyway? Well, it just wouldn't look professional, and the scriptures are, I don't even need to say, extremely holy and sacred to us, so Printing wants them to look professional when they put them up, not raw from the cutting-room floor.

Ok I think I can summerize the thread so that all hopefully understand.

ReachTheWorld wanted to know if there existed in the church a PDF form of all the scriptures. His theory was that it was what they printed the paperback copies of the Book of Mormon. If this theory was correct he wanted to know if they could post the printer's edition (PDF) onto the website.

JamesAnderson was talking about the website and the publicly available version of the scriptures. He looked around and didn't find a PDF version of the scriptures.

ReachTheWorld found out that the scriptures will be posted in a new language every one to two months and that in a short time, all the languages will be posted. He also found out that the church does have the printer's PDF but being the printer's PDF it is very messy and not really suitable for public display. (Who wants to go from the top left to the bottom right to the middle to the top middle as they are trying to read.)

• Anyway we now know they do exist in a file that could be published to the web but is too dirty.
• Currently posted on the internet are no such PDFs and will never be.
• The church will in a couple years have ALL languages on the internet
• This will be in HTML/XML format

Thank you everyone for your research and hopefully this summerizes everyone's work.

Thanks TomW
On another forum Dolcezza has transulated the NDE vision of Sarah Menet into ITALIAN
She has lived iItaly. So with a little help i think you could get her to transulate other church books. Its 71 pages long with about 7 pictures.
http://gods-wr.ath.cx/There_is_no_Death-Italiano.pdf

http://gods-wr.ath.cx/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=709

http://gods-wr.ath.cx/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=296
http://www.allanstime.com/Spiritual/Boo ... _death.htm

http://gods-wr.ath.cx/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=4821#4821

On this forum i miss the EDIT button and the Delete
Dolcezza lives in England and is a Language Teacher, probable speaks Italino very well.
here is her E-mail address

http://gods-wr.ath.cx/phpBB2/privmsg.php?mode=post&u=3

This topic later drifted into how to use the forums. I have moved the rest of the conversation to the thread [thread=269]Editing and Deleting a Post[/thread]. Now we can return to the topic of Languages for the Online Scriptures.

Though I think this thread has come to its conclusion.

Because there is not the Bible in Italian into CD or online version of LDS scritures, I'm thinking to make it.
I have all Italian version approved by the Church (Luzzi) as TXT file and I wonder if there is a software to code it into HTML or do I do everything by hand? (Code reference, ecc, into HTML source).
Vice versa I'll be available to partecipate at a Church project, if exist.

Mariano, you said you wanted to work on an italian version of the scriptures yourself. But you might not be able to distribute it.

The copyright for the current version of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price are owned by the Church, and in order to distribute them to others, you would need permission.

Even the Bible in some languages, depending on the version the Church uses, is under copyright to someone. For example, the Spanish and Portuguese versions currently used are copyright by Evangelical organizations in Spain and Portugal (respectively). With the announcement of the Church's own Spanish translation, that changes to the copyright owned by the Church for Spanish.

Bottom line is that making the scriptures available is sometimes complicated by copyright issues as well as the technical problems here.

Hi - my wife and I have just arrived in France to serve a mission and we want to use the scriptures in French to read and to teach. We are pleased with the official church scripture app but it does not include the Bible. I am aware that the official Bible for the church in France is the Louis Second version. Is this not yet available within the app? I was sure the French version appeared momentarily on my wife's iPad, but it may have been an illusion as it reverted to the 3 other standard works on re-opening. Please advise. Elder C.

Is post has not been updated in a long time. Can anybody offer some insight into expect language release timing for additional scriptures in the library app? Specifically, I’ve been watching for Arabic for years. PDF and print has been helpful but not as convenient as the app. And since it has been in print for years, it might seem digital support is not far away (especially with all the new content added other than the scriptures).:
I have heard some rumors about delaying release jntil a new translation is done. Is there truth to that? Is a new translation in the works?
I’d be interested to hear updates and timelines on other languages as well. It would be nice to know what is expected.

bb