Bibledit offers the option to work with source languages.
Basically the source languages of the Bible are Hebrew, a bit of Aramaic, which is dealt with as part of Hebrew, and Greek. Where data about the source languages is freely available, Bibledit aims to offer it to the user as an aid in the Bible translation work.
Source languages can also be in another language than Hebrew or Greek. If such languages are tagged with information referring to the Hebrew or Greek, then such languages are also regarded as source languages. For example, Bibledit offers the King James Bible with Strong's lemmata and morphology.
Source languages are accessible through menu View / Source languages.
The source languages window behaves as if it is a web page. Links are indicated, and if these are clicked, actions take place.
We are going to use an example to see how the source languages work, and how they can aid in the translation work.
Open the Source Languages window by going to menu View, and then putting a tick in front of menu entry "Source languages". The Source languages window will appear.
Move the editor to Matthew 1:1. Initially no source language will have been selected for use. There will be an indication about this, and a link to add a source language. Click that link, and choose the King James Bible. After choosing OK, the source language will display.
It displays Matthew 1:1 in the English language. Click on the word "Jesus". It will now say that this word is a noun, and will give more information about it. It also will give the definition of the word "Jesus" and its meanings. This will help you in your translation work.
This is basically how the source languages work. There are more possibilities. To see these, explore the [actions] link. You can search for text, view definitions, change which source languages will be displayed, and so on.
Bibledit itself comes with a limited set of source languages. At the time of writing this, it comes with the King James Bible only. It does not have any Greek or Hebrew source languages. To help you getting access to more source languages, Bibledit can import a source language from data that you may have available.
Bibledit can import extra source languages from BibleWorks. We're going to show how this works by using an example, where we import The Scrivener Greek New Testament. This is how to do it.
Step 1: Export the text module from BibleWorks as follows.
* In BibleWorks 8, running on Windows, set the active Bible to "SCR", the Scrivener New Testament.
* Search for the text "*", without the quotes. In the command line this can be done by entering ".*", and then pressing Enter. All the verses of that module will now show up in the verse list.
* Right-click in the verse list, and choose "Copy Verse List + Text" / "Copy to Clipboard". It will transfer all the verses, and this will take a while to complete.
* Start WordPad, and paste the text from the clipboard into WordPad.
* In this example, the first line of text should look like this:
SCR Matthew 1:1 Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, υἱοῦ Δαβὶδ, υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ.
* Save the text from WordPad as a Unicode Text Document.
* Do the same with the module that contains the morphology. In the example this will be module SCM.
* After pasting the text into WordPad, the first line should look like this:
SCM Matthew 1:1 βίβλος@nnfs γένεσις@ngfs Ἰησοῦς@ngms Χριστός@ngms υἱός@ngms Δαυίδ@tp υἱός@ngms Ἀβραάμ@tp
* You will end up having two files. In the example these will be named scr.txt and scm.txt.
* Transfer these files from Windows to Linux.
* Both the files should be opened in gedit once, and then saved in UTF-8 format. It is important to now just use the "Save" option, but "Save as". This is necessary so as to make it true Unicode. Else Bibledit would complain about it.
Step 2: Import the two files into Bibledit as follows.
* In Bibledit choose menu File / Import.
* When it asks what you would like to import, choose "Source language".
* When it asks what type of data to import, choose "From BibleWorks".
* When it asks to select files, select the scr.txt and scm.txt, the two files create above.
* When it asks for the name of the source language, enter the name you desire. In this example we will enter "Scrivener New Testament".
* Press the Apply button. This will import the Source language.
This will finish the import. In the Source languages window you can add this new source language to the ones being used. Once this is done, it will show up, and can be used normally.