MacArthur Sermon Archive - Thousands of Typos - Who is Responsible?

With 3-5 typos in each sermon, based on my initial survey, there may be 10-20,000 typos in the archive. I am not talking about bad spoken English, etc. These are typos likewordsnotspacedproperly.

Still, it is a very useful resource.

I know the MacArthur sermons at GTY we're not closely reviewed or edited, but I expected that this resource would be cleaned up.

So whose typos are these? And if we report typos to Logos, will they say that they can't change the originals? Will the typos be corrected if reported?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

MJ. Smith

[Y][:D]

I don't know but I'd suspect that they would at least run all changes by GTY/

SineNomine

Typos are easy to make and very common. I frequently come across typos in resources of all kinds. If I were you, I would simply report what I find and not worry too much about it. Realistically, nothing will be changed any time soon, and nothing will be changed if no typos are reported.

I know the MacArthur sermons at GTY we're not closely reviewed or edited, but I expected that this resource would be cleaned up.

I don't know but I'd suspect that they would at least run all changes by GTY/

Geo Philips

There is a weird one in the very first sermon where its a fillable text box instead of a word. I have to say this should have been easily caught in some kind of QA because 1) it is the very first sermon and 2) Its pretty evident even at a glance.

Slightly disappointing

Rick Carmickle

A user in a separate thread had noted the spelling of the church father "Chrissistum" at GTY. This alternate spelling is now in Logos. The Logos edition is an exact replica of the GTY archive without any additional clean up work. When it is a free transcript on the GTY website, I understand typos and misspellings. And I don't even care about goofs on Facebook posts and threads where people are typing on their phones.

So Logos just took what was given to them and tagged the verses. I am certain that means they will not correct the typos since Logos is just replicating the GTY archive. The corrections need to come from GTY. Reporting typos to Logos will not make a difference.

Still, I look forward to reading the sermons.

Don Awalt

St. John Chrysostom I presume...

Jacob Hantla

There are other problems like this screenshot from logosres:jhnmcrthrsrrchv;art=sermon.2012.44 :

The formatting for the text "Safe in the Arms of God" and "Related Resource" are clearly not done well.

Also, I would expect that resources like Safe in the Arms of God would be linked (logosres:safearmsgod;art=title / https://www.logos.com/product/3052/safe-in-the-arms-of-god)

All of these sermons are freely available online but we paid the $200 premium (now listed at $400) for the hand-editing that goes into Logos works and the tagging for things like this. I hope that this resources gets fixed and updated quickly.

Robert M. Warren

This is certainly mystifying. Did Logos not think anyone would care?

I am certain that GTY disclosed the existence of typos, since they posted this on their website:

http://www.gty.org/resources/questions/QA521

RyanB

This is certainly mystifying. Did Logos not think anyone would care?

I am certain that GTY disclosed the existence of typos, since they posted this on their website:

http://www.gty.org/resources/questions/QA521

I think the link that Robert posted may be helpful to this discussion. Since I know many people (myself oftentimes included) won't take the time to visit a link to an outside page, I decided to cut and paste GTY's response below (the typos in their response below are also a bit telling [;)]:

Why are there errors in the sermon transcript archive? Don’t you guys check these?

August 06, 2009 QA521

We do our best to ensure that everything you read on our website is free from error. Our transcript archive prsents unusual challenges, however.

There are a number of factors unique to John MacArthur’s preaching ministry—e.g., the depth study; theological vocabulary; and historical (and contemporary) names, places, and events—pose unique challenge to any transcriptionist. The best transcripts you’ll find on our website were probably produced by Arline Hampton; she transcribed John’s sermons for more than three decades. Her familiarity with John and her love for this ministry provided all of us with transcripts that are largely error free. We are grateful for her labor of love. Though she is now with the Lord, the fruit of her ministry continues.

Several years ago, when we were considering posting all of John MacArthur’s sermon transcripts online, we had to decide whether we would allow the public to see transcription errors or wait until all of them were corrected.

A large number of sermons had originally been transcribed on paper, using a typewriter. We then used character recognition software to convert them into a digital format, but they were far from perfect (e.g., question marks came out as 7s, the capital letter “I” came out as the number 1). So we stopped that approach and assigned a large batch of John’s sermons to a professional transcription company. The quality of those transcripts was quite good but still less than perfect since the transcribers lacked the in-house familiarity with John’s ministry, theological terms, etc.

In the end, we decided the best approach was to open the transcript archive, warts and all, because we thought the ministry benefit would exceed the error liability. We accepted the imperfections, knowing we would chip away at the errors over the years to correct as many mistakes as possible.

And that’s where you come in, website user! We have always depended on you to inform us of errors so we can correct them as soon as possible. You can email us at typos@gty.org.

If you’ve become part of the team of informants, helping us to achieve the greatest accuracy possible in our transcripts, please accept our sincerest thanks. We very much appreciate you and your partnership in unleashing God’s truth, one verse at a time!

Rosie Perera

I think the link that Robert posted may be helpful to this discussion. Since I know many people (myself oftentimes included) won't take the time to visit a link to an outside page, I decided to cut and paste GTY's response below (the typos in their response below are also a bit telling :

Very interesting! Thanks for that back story.

si_cochran

Logos, can you please respond to this thread? We need to be able to make an informed decision on this resource.

Graham Criddle

Logos, can you please respond to this thread?

Let's bear in mind that a lot of people are probably still away on holiday and it may take a little longer than normal for the Faithlife team to pick up on this.

Phil Gons (Logos)

With 3-5 typos in each sermon, based on my initial survey, there may be 10-20,000 typos in the archive. I am not talking about bad spoken English, etc. These are typos likewordsnotspacedproperly.

Still, it is a very useful resource.

I know the MacArthur sermons at GTY we're not closely reviewed or edited, but I expected that this resource would be cleaned up.

So whose typos are these? And if we report typos to Logos, will they say that they can't change the originals? Will the typos be corrected if reported?

Thanks for reporting this issue. We'll look into it and see what we can do to correct these issues. Since we were working with digital files, my guess is that the vast majority of these are issues with the files we received. I'm sorry this content isn't at a higher quality. We'll see what we can do to make it better. In the meantime, please report the things you come across. Thanks.

Jonathan

Since we were working with digital files, my guess is that the vast majority of these are issues with the files we received.

Isn't this the same reason why Faithlife stopped offering the Galaxie TJL's?

NB.Mick

Isn't this the same reason why Faithlife stopped offering the Galaxie TJL's?

No. My understanding was that the Galaxie people (actually one single individual, IIRC) refused to put in links and wanted their offering treated as something like the Vyrso books. This probably was acceptable in the 1990s or whenever they started to offer in Logos format, but isn't acceptable today in the Logos environment - see all the threads where people complain about missing links.

I think, going forward to Logos 7, Faithlife should offer a Visual Filter overlay that includes user-provided ("crowd-sourced") typo corrections and links. Optional but functional.

Jonathan

No. My understanding was that the Galaxie people (actually one single individual, IIRC) refused to put in links and wanted their offering treated as something like the Vyrso books. This probably was acceptable in the 1990s or whenever they started to offer in Logos format, but isn't acceptable today in the Logos environment - see all the threads where people complain about missing links.

I think you are right. However, I do seem to remember, back when Logos was offering Galaxie products, that they were annually delaying the release to the TJL's because of issues with the files the received from Galaxie.

Regardless, this resource should probably have been spelled checked in a more thorough manner. Furthermore, Faithlife should have either withheld the product, or notified customers proactively of the need to future improvements.

In my opinion, the quality of this product seems like a homemade PB rather than a Faithlife product.

I think, going forward to Logos 7, Faithlife should offer a Visual Filter overlay that includes user-provided ("crowd-sourced") typo corrections and links. Optional but functional.

[Y]

Matthew C Jones

In the end, we decided the best approach was to open the transcript archive, warts and all, because we thought the ministry benefit would exceed the error liability. We accepted the imperfections, knowing we would chip away at the errors over the years to correct as many mistakes as possible.

Thank you, Ryan, for posting that response from GTY regarding the typos. I would prefer that the sermon collection had no errors at all. When I saw their reasoning for releasing it with errors I had to agree with them. Better to have it now than to wait 5 years.

Rick Carmickle

Thanks for your reply, Phil.

I now have an opportunity to put to use my textual criticism skills and I can tell you that the mistakes came from the files provided by GTY.

This resource will be so valuable to so many that it must be done well. Perhaps GTY didn't want to invest the resources to clean it up better, although some modestly trained volunteers could really accomplish a lot in a hurry. Most of these typos could be easily corrected by high school students, although you might need some training to pick up the "Chrissistum" errors, and the Greek transliteration mistakes.

Logos users can report these mistakes, but I know that Logos will not correct mistakes if the original publication had it that way. Even well-edited books from the major publishers have mistakes in them that are missed by a dozen proof readers. But unless Logos tells us that Logos will correct the reported mistakes that replicate the files from GTY, it seems futile to report them. When GTY and Logos explain the plan to get these up to par, then I think many Logos users will pitch in. But at this point, the files are bad enough that it should go through a redraft before Logos users find the rest.

Matthew C Jones

Perhaps GTY didn't want to invest the resources to clean it up better, although some modestly trained volunteers could really accomplish a lot in a hurry. Most of these typos could be easily corrected by high school students, although you might need some training to pick up the "Chrissistum" errors, and the Greek transliteration mistakes.

At the price they are selling it for Logos ought to do the error correcting.

toughski

At the price they are selling it for Logos ought to do the error correcting.

I agree. Especially since Logos knew the quality of the resource before they got involved. And if they didn't they should have!

MJ. Smith

At the price they are selling it for Logos ought to do the error correcting.

If their contract allows it. The standard contract would not. However, it sounds as if a contract modification might be an easy deal.

Rod Bergen

I hadn't realized that John MacArthur had such poor elocution...

[quote]It’s a fantastic thing. Let me take ya to Romans 13, because here it’s explained even further. (John F. MacArthur Jr., John MacArthur Sermon Archive (Panorama City, CA: Grace to You, 2014).)

Rosie Perera

I hadn't realized that John MacArthur had such poor elocution...

[quote]It’s a fantastic thing. Let me take ya to Romans 13, because here it’s explained even further. (John F. MacArthur Jr., John MacArthur Sermon Archive (Panorama City, CA: Grace to You, 2014).)

Not surprising. Many people pronounce it that way colloquially, and a sermon is sometimes a rather colloquial way of speaking to a congregation. However I'm surprised that the transcriber transcribed the pronunciation literally instead of spelling it out as "you". Oh well, Like Mark Barnes said, these sorts of things wouldn't bother me that much if I had this resource. I'm not a huge fan of MacArthur though, so I wouldn't buy his sermon transcripts unless they were much less expensive.

Ann Hudson

I hadn't realized that John MacArthur had such poor elocution...

[quote]It’s a fantastic thing. Let me take ya to Romans 13, because here it’s explained even further. (John F. MacArthur Jr., John MacArthur Sermon Archive (Panorama City, CA: Grace to You, 2014).)

(chuckle) ...how about Charles Stanley, with his southern drawl?

Reckon on his sermon transcripts ever being published on Logos? Never heard so many "ya's" is all my life!

Gabe Powell

Friends, I am the Internet Ministry Coordinator at Grace to You and have worked with Faithlife on the MacArthur Sermon Archive project.

As a number of you have already noted, this brief article explains why there are so many typographical errors in the archive. The average transcript length is approximately 20 pages (depending on formatting, of course). At 3,500+ sermons, that's 70,000 pages. Thankfully, not all sermons have a lot of typos. Sermons preached in the last 10 or so years have significantly reduced errors due to being created digitally. There may still be misspelling or faulty transliteration of Greek or Hebrew words, but the transcripts from the last few years should be largely clean.

Additionally, we are continually, if slowly, correcting errors when we are notified by website users, or when sermons are being prepared for our radio broadcast. Lastly, in light of larger and exciting ministry projects, we are working on a plan to systematically improve the archive.

All this to say that I would encourage you to make use of this valuable resource, even with its imperfections. Grace to You will send updated transcripts to Faithlife on a regular basis, and they will update the resource files according to their own schedule.

I know I'm biased, but in my estimation this sermon archive is the most valuable of them all. No other sermon archive includes every verse in the New Testament preached with the intense exegetical focus of John MacArthur. Sadly, the MacArthur Commentaries are not currently available in Logos, but this sermon archive gives you the same content in terms of interpretation and explanation.

If you'd like to take the archive for a test drive before purchasing, you can use the poor man's version on our website: gty.org. Personally, I'm looking forward to having this product in my Logos library.

Full disclosure: I am making these statements voluntarily with no financial benefit to me or Grace to You. Just trying to clear the air a bit as a fellow Logos user.

Rick Carmickle

Gabriel, thanks for your post.

Full disclosure: I was the original poster on this thread and am a graduate of TMS. I agree that, even in its unedited form, it is worth it to me to keep the archive. I am glad I collected all of the commentaries as they became available, and wish others who want them now could get access to them. But that is a Logos-Moody dispute. And GTY was generous a few years ago making all of Johns sermons free on MP3. (I grew up on these sermons, borrowing then from the tape library.)

I understand why unedited transcripts were made available on the GTY website. But most of these typos could have been easily fixed with a quick review before being published on Logos. I think even heavier editing would be worthwhile, even if the sermon transcript is altered from the original. (See the eternal sonship question). I would think that competent college and seminary students would have been happy to review and clean these up. Don't take out the sound of his voice that you can hear as you read them, but clean up the clutter that happens with the spoken word. These will last forever, until Jesus returns.

Very few in the last century will leave a legacy to match John's. That is why the surprise that these sermons were not in better shape. Until they are fixed, I will learn to read through them and ignore the mistakes. But it seems like a bigger job getting them updated now that Logos has put in the verse tags.

abondservant

Friends, I am the Internet Ministry Coordinator at Grace to You and have worked with Faithlife on the MacArthur Sermon Archive project.

As a number of you have already noted, this brief article explains why there are so many typographical errors in the archive. The average transcript length is approximately 20 pages (depending on formatting, of course). At 3,500+ sermons, that's 70,000 pages. Thankfully, not all sermons have a lot of typos. Sermons preached in the last 10 or so years have significantly reduced errors due to being created digitally. There may still be misspelling or faulty transliteration of Greek or Hebrew words, but the transcripts from the last few years should be largely clean.

Additionally, we are continually, if slowly, correcting errors when we are notified by website users, or when sermons are being prepared for our radio broadcast. Lastly, in light of larger and exciting ministry projects, we are working on a plan to systematically improve the archive.

All this to say that I would encourage you to make use of this valuable resource, even with its imperfections. Grace to You will send updated transcripts to Faithlife on a regular basis, and they will update the resource files according to their own schedule.

I know I'm biased, but in my estimation this sermon archive is the most valuable of them all. No other sermon archive includes every verse in the New Testament preached with the intense exegetical focus of John MacArthur. Sadly, the MacArthur Commentaries are not currently available in Logos, but this sermon archive gives you the same content in terms of interpretation and explanation.

If you'd like to take the archive for a test drive before purchasing, you can use the poor man's version on our website: gty.org. Personally, I'm looking forward to having this product in my Logos library.

Full disclosure: I am making these statements voluntarily with no financial benefit to me or Grace to You. Just trying to clear the air a bit as a fellow Logos user.

Firstly thank you for posting [:)].

Secondly you should talk to Logos - I bet they would forward their typo reports on to you guys in an excel spread sheet. Some will be duplicated, some will be faulty, but many many many more will be accurate. It would be a quick way to have ALL of the typos brought to light in a relatively short time period.

Blessings sir and thank you to GTY for making these available both on the website and in Logos. I am hoping they are a part of the March Madness sale, and that he wins this year

Mark Barnes

Thanks Gabriel for your post. I for one greatly appreciate the archive, and given that it's a transcript, I don't find the typos too much of a problem at all.

Gabe Powell

Rick, greetings from a fellow TMS grad :-).

"But most of these typos could have been easily fixed with a quick review before being published on Logos."

Perhaps, but it's not that simple. It's one thing for a group of people to run through a couple thousand documents cleaning them up. But their work needs to be checked and managed and coordinated. Since the transcripts are based off of available audio, they need to be checked against the audio (when it is unclear what John intended to say).

For example, recently I had several emails back and forth regarding a reference John made to an historical figure. He correctly found a problem, but offered the wrong solution. It happened to be a situation where two similar names were viable options, and the two individuals had similar situations, so I had to compare John's description very carefully with the historical details of each individual to determine which person he was actually referring to, and then I would know the proper spelling of the name. Add to that, this person is often known by a nickname, not his actual name.

All that to say, improving the transcripts and matching them to the audio can be far more time consuming than most people realize. There are plenty of easy and obvious fixes, but anything that's worth doing, is worth doing well. And we're heading that direction. But it's not easy.

Paul C

I don't find the typos too much of a problem at all.

I suppose living ones life shackled by the Queen's English would desensitize one to errors. You probably just see the typos as adding Flavor and Color to the text. [;)]

Gabe Powell

Anyone know how I can change the subtext in my comments (i.e. my computer information)? I've looked all over the profile area and can't find it.