Transferring notes across devices/desktop and languages

I just added some notes to my Spanish scriptures on my iPhone app. They do not transfer when I look-up the same passage in English. I then went on my desk-top and cannot find those same notes in my Spanish scriptures anywhere. When I log-on and go to my Spanish scriptures, the note task bar does not even show up. Yet, the notes remain on my phone. Yes, I am logged-in to the same account on my iPhone and the desktop.

Thank you,

Notes, annotations, and highlights don't sync between languages (for things like highlights, this would require a word-to-word mapping between the languages). However, I would expect annotations on the phone's Spanish content to sync to LDS.org's Spanish content – did you give it some time to sync?

Am I doing something wrong? None of the notes I wrote in my Spanish scriptures yesterday on my iPhone are on my desk top. In fact, like I said the other day, the "Save and Share bar" does not even appear when I switch to the Spanish scriptures on my desk top. In other words, I can only make notes on my Spanish scriptures on my phone.

Interesting – I'm not able to annotate the Spanish scriptures on LDS.org, either. I'd never tried it before, but assumed that it would work. It's possible that the Spanish scriptures on LDS.org don't support annotations yet (the main indicator being that the bar doesn't show up at the bottom).

sbradshaw wrote:It's possible that the Spanish scriptures on LDS.org don't support annotations yet (the main indicator being that the bar doesn't show up at the bottom).

Correct. This was reported several months ago here.

Currently, online Notes only work in English. All of your Spanish annotations are syncing to the LDS Cloud, so if/when Notes is available in other languages online, your Spanish GL annotations should sync to online Notes.

I'd like to vote for ncorrea's idea of transferring notes across languages. I mainly study the Scriptures in Spanish, but I prefer reading and writing in English for most everything else. Most of my Scripture notes are in English.

I know word-for-word highlights would be unfeasible, but I would be fine with seeing the entire verse highlighted as long as I have some visual indicator telling me that there are notes behind that verse.

This isn't a complete solution, but in the meantime you could try using a multi-column tool like this one:
http://www.scripturetools.net/multi/bof ... ls=eng,spa
If you sign in with your LDS Account, you can see your English highlights in the English column while you're reading in the Spanish column.

That is a nifty idea. But does the church have any privacy/copyright/etc. objections, since the website is displaying the user's logged-in data through another website? The same could be done for other personal data. You need to be logged on to lds.org, but still.

The Church doesn't approve of web scraping their sites, but I haven't seen anything against loading LDS.org pages directly with iframes.

Iframes don't allow the surrounding site to access anything on the embedded site directly – unless it's on the same web domain – so login credentials and private account access can't be spied on. This actually caused some frustration for me because it makes it impossible to ask the embedded page how tall it is, so I can't set up smooth scrolling or synchronized column scrolling of the iframes.

Will transfering/sync highlights between english and spanish scriptures be available at some point? I would find it really useful!!

luigicallero wrote: Fri May 23, 2025 2:29 pm Will transfering/sync highlights between english and spanish scriptures be available at some point? I would find it really useful!!

Are you referring to making a highlight in one language, and then "replicating" that exact highlight in another language?

If I remember correctly, when this type of question was previously raised in the Forum, discussion centered around the challenges of accurately implementing that approach. If this was limited to entire verses, then that should be achievable since (I believe) verses are standardized between all languages. But since each language has different sentence constructs, trying to map partial-verse highlights would be impractical. And of course many words & expressions would likewise run into the same issues, where in certain languages a single word may translate into a multi-word approximation, or may even "disappear" in the translated context.

That said, since most Forum participants are regular Church members like yourself, generally we don't have any insider information regarding current or future plans. I'd suggest submitting this via the Feedback functionality found at the bottom of most Church webpages, or inside any of the Church apps. A verse-to-verse auto-mapping would definitely be of help to many members, including myself.

Not knowing anything about translations, I wonder how practical a sentence-to-sentence marking approach might work.

Doing a word-to-word sounds like an interesting project for a BYU class studying AI applications.