TIP of the Day: Interactives: Text Converter

MJ. Smith

In the interest of full disclosure, this feature makes me grumpy for the following reasons:

1. The various conversions schemes are not well documented. I would like a complete table of all transliteration schemes not off-site references for some, nothing for others, and short descriptions of variations on others.
2. Greek and Hebrew are probably the languages that the user base is most comfortable transliterating. Where is the support for Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Cyrillic ...
3. For the average mono-lingual Logos user going from transliteration to original language is the more common problem, especially given the treatment of transliterated text within the Logos ecosystem. Therefore when the transliteration scheme is defined in a resource, being able to go from transliteration to original language is very important.
4. As the pasted input text can exceed the input box size, I wish there was a clear function ... or at least a select all ... to insure that invisible text is not left when clearing to enter new text.

However, this interactive provides a very useful function - it allows student to be confident that the Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic text is transliterated according to the scheme required by their professor, a journal or a publisher. For example, from the SBL Handbook of Style student supplement:

3.One gets to the Text Converter through any of the normal methods including a direct link off the Tools Menu. It's panel has the standard forward, back and history features as well as the standard Resource panel menu.

4. There is a standard information panel option with a Done to close.

5. There is a Help function that explains how to use the tool and provides some of the transliteration information I griped about above. Note the link for an Ancient Languages keyboard which is not discussed in this post.

6. For a Greek example, I simply copied a bit of a Greek Bible. Note that I did not turn off all filters.

7. The converted results appear in all Greek formats offered by the tool. The easiest way to mess up in this tool is to copy from the wrong box. Note that each box has a specific Copy option.

8. A similar example for Hebrew. The handling of the citation has been reported as an error.

9. the result from clicking on Copy in Logos and Pasting into this post:

2 1 לָמָּה רָגְשׁוּ גוֹיִם וּלְאֻמִּים יֶהְגּוּ רִיק׃
2      יִתְיַצְּבוּ מַלְכֵי אֶרֶץ וְרוֹזְנִים נוֹסְדוּ יָחַד עַל יְהוָה וְעַל מְשִׁיחֹו׃
3      נְנַתְּקָה אֶת מוֹסְרוֹתֵימוֹ וְנַשְׁלִיכָה מִמֶּנּוּ עֲבֹתֵימוֹ׃
4      יוֹשֵׁב בַּשָּׁמַיִם יִשְׂחָק אֲדֹנָי יִלְעַג לָמוֹ׃
5      אָז יְדַבֵּר אֵלֵימוֹ בְאַפֹּו וּבַחֲרוֹנֹו יְבַהֲלֵמוֹ׃


Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: With Werkgroep Informatica, Vrije Universiteit Morphology; Bible. O.T. Hebrew. Werkgroep Informatica, Vrije Universiteit. (Logos Bible Software, 2006), Ps 2.

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10. A portion of the references to transliteration schemes: