Textual Alternates

[mhosken]

A proposal to add \tv. See (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gN900AzIYTdkbSugfX32UxVt6Aru1OFr2X2mjZ_n3Ms/edit)

[KentSpiel]

Textual variants is ambiguous. I assumed source text variants, but here you mean alternate translations, which may or may not be based on source text variants. I would change this to simply Text variants.

One application night be for a standard critical text version and a Majority Text variant of the text (i.e., for the Gideons). However, I would expect that text variants would be accompanied by variant footnotes. Since these are milestones could footnotes be included in the variant text? Could text variant milestones be included inside footnotes? Some MT variants include alternate punctuation, paragraphing and other markup. Would that be allowed?

In the Biblica context we do have texts with variants for different audiences but we usually have separate projects for each context. TAZI versions are the most common. For these projects there are hundreds of changes. This is not a solution for them.
Another common variant is Anglicization (Anglicisation) of US texts. Again the variations are many. Far better would be a script or process (like encoding converters perhaps, but with the option of verse targeting) that could be used to convert the master text to the variant.

[jwickberg]

I would like more information about the problem we are intending to solve with this and how prevalent the usage would be.

From my reading of the document, it appears that this would only be useful if some tools supported a way to select which variant you wanted and then would only include that variant in the output.

There would also be questions about what to do with the different variants when doing spell checking, Biblical Terms and probably others.

[davidg-sil]

When checking drafts with a multi-dialect team, it is quite common for a lot of time to be consumed with discussions along the lines of:
A: "I don't like it. In my dialect we'd say ..., to avoid it sounding like (near-sounding unacceptable dialect word/phrase)"
B: "We're doing a common translation, people will know we're not using (dialect word)"
A: "Yes, it's a common translation and Y and Z dialects say it the same way as we do in our dialect."
C: "I think I've maybe heard Z speakers say ... "
A: "Which is much closer to how I say it than this."
C: "If I'm right. I've heard it the other way too..."

This markup (especially if supported by tools!) would allow:
(a) short-circuiting of a lot of this argumentation.
(b) acknowledgement / preservation of dialectal differences, even if they probably won't be used in the printed edition. This might be an important resource if access to one of the dialects is very limited.
(c) avoiding a lot of lost time in trying to remember how it was phrased if testing proves that speaker A was right and it's acceptable in other dialects.
(d) production of dialect-specific variants if there's enough demand / priorities change.
(e) Acknowlegement of a translator's dialect in this way might also be of cultural value, or help with team-building.