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31 lines
6.9 KiB
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\id FRT EN_ULT unfoldingWord® Literal Text
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\usfm 3.0
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\ide UTF-8
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\h Front matter
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\toc1 Front Matter
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\toc2 Front Matter
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\toc3 Front Matter
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\mt Front Matter
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\imt1 unfoldingWord® Literal Text - English
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\im \em an unrestricted literal version of the Bible intended for translation into any language as a tool for use by Bible translators\em*
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\imt1 Overview
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\ip The ULT (English) is an open-licensed adaptation of \bk The American Standard Version\bk*, intended to provide a ‘form-centric’ rendering of the biblical text from the original languages (Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic, and Koiné Greek) into English. This increases a translator’s understanding of the lexical and grammatical composition of the biblical text by adhering closely to the grammatical (i.e. parts of speech) and syntactic (i.e. word order) stuctures of the original languages.
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\imt1 Viewing
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\ip To read or print the ULT, see the latest published version of the ULT project on Door43 at https://door43.org/u/Door43-Catalog/en_ult/. (Any ongoing development may be seen at https://door43.org/u/unfoldingWord/en_ult/.)
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\imt1 Contributors
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\ip Contributors to this work are listed in the `contributor` field in the manifest file at https://git.door43.org/Door43-Catalog/en_ult/src/master/manifest.yaml.
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\imt1 Introducing the ULT
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\ip The ULT (unfoldingWord® Literal Text) is a form-centric (and thus “literal”) version of the Bible in English. It is intended to be used alongside the UST (unfoldingWord® Simplified Text) and other translation resources to give English-speaking mother-tongue translators (MTTs) a more complete understanding of the messages communicated in the Bible. For MTTs who do not have reading knowledge of the original biblical languages, the ULT provides a sense of \em how\em* these messages were communicated in those original languages. It is anticipated that the ULT and other resources will be translated from English into the world’s Gateway Languages (GLs) so that MTTs worldwide can use them as a set of resources for making accurate translations of the Bible into their own languages.
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\imt2 Retaining Original Forms and Structures
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\ip The unfoldingWord® Literal Text (ULT) is designed to be used as a tool for Bible translation in conjunction with the unfoldingWord® Simplified Text (UST) which can be viewed at https://git.door43.org/Door43-Catalog/en_ust, the unfoldingWord® Translation Words (UTW) at https://git.door43.org/Door43-Catalog/en_tw, and the unfoldingWord® Translation Notes (UTN) at https://git.door43.org/Door43-Catalog/en_tn. It is not an end-user Bible, which seeks to transform all of the structures of the original biblical languages into those that are natural and idiomatic in the target language. Instead, unlike the UST and unlike an end-user Bible, the ULT is designed to reflect the forms of the source languages, so that the MTT can see what they are. By using the ULT, the MTT can “look through” it to see how the original Bible expressed the biblical ideas.
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\ip Therefore, the editors of the ULT have retained the grammatical and syntactic structures of the original as much as the target language (English or other Gateway Language) will reasonably allow. Only if the original structure is ungrammatical in the target language will it be changed into a structure that is grammatical in the target language. (It does no good to make a translation that a MTT using this tool cannot understand.) But as much as the target language allows, the structures of the original are retained in the ULT. For English, it is often possible to retain nouns as nouns, verbs as verbs, etc., but their order in the original sentence has often been changed.
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\ip In addition to the grammatical forms, the ULT also retains the idioms and the figures of speech found in the original languages so that the MTT can consider them and use them if they communicate the right thing in his target language (i.e. a minority or Other Language [OL], not Gateway Language). If these aspects of the original language text were changed in the English version (or other Gateway Language translation) of the ULT, then the OL translator would never see them. Furthermore, their accompanying explanations (found in the unfoldingWord® Translation Notes) would not make sense.
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\ip The ULT and the UST are designed to be complementary tools for use by an OL translator. These tools should be as useful as possible, which means that the ULT has retained original language structures that would not always be retained in an end-user Bible. Therefore, you must understand that the ULT will often lack naturalness (and sometimes also lack clarity) because it aims to reproduce the original language structures and figures of speech that the GL may not normally use. However, in places where the ULT lacks clarity, there will be BOTH a Translation Note to explain the meaning of the structure for the OL translator AND a clear rendering of the original meaning in the UST. Together, the UTN and the UST will provide the meaning of the text wherever that meaning is in doubt in the ULT. In this way, the various tools work together to provide an OL translator with more complete information about both the form and the meaning of the biblical text as written in the original languages.
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\ip One specific way in which the ULT and UST are complementary tools concerns the selection of meaning in the original language texts. There are many instances in the biblical text where the meaning of a word or phrase in the original languages is ambiguous. In those cases, the ULT has attempted to retain the ambiguity of meaning, if possible. In contrast, the UST selects the most probable meaning and expresses that meaning according to its own translation method. NOTE: The ULT may select meaning in cases where the meaning of the original language is linguistically ambiguous but seems clear from the context.
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\imt1 Further information
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\ip Further details about translation decisions in the ULT can be seen at https://git.door43.org/Door43-Catalog/en_ult#overview.
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\imt1 Alignment of the ULT with the Original Languages
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\ip The words and phrases of the ULT have been manually aligned with the original Hebrew or Greek words that they were translated from. Because this is a literal translation, the alignments are largely one-to-one (compared to the UST which has much more complex alignments). The alignment information is stored within custom z-aln fields in the USFM source files. Alignments can be viewed graphically in the translationCore checking program downloadable from https://www.translationcore.com/, and in the forthcoming translationCore Create and translationCore Study apps.
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\imt Ongoing Development
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\ip Development of the ULT is ongoing and although the bulk of the work has now been completed, consistency checking within the ULT and detailed checks against the original languages are still in early stages. Any suggested improvements can be passed to the ULT team via the Issues page at https://git.door43.org/unfoldingWord/en_ult/issues.
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