Notes

Project stages

We are currently in 'first-draft mode'. This means that we're trying to fill in all 31,102 Bible verses with text, so that we have a Bible that we can at least start reading and find every reference. However, drafting is only stage one of a multi-stage, multi-year project.

Proposed stages include:

1. Have the computer output a very literal English version of each word in the original texts (using both our own and others' resources that are open-licensed)
2. Re-order those sentences to make them readable in English, thus producing our OET Literal Version
3. Manually (i.e., not using so-called 'AI' tools) produce a modern-English draft of each sentence from that Literal Version (using our parallel verse pages which include other resources, and our word pages and other online lexicons, etc.), thus producing a first draft of our OET Readers' Version
4. Rework the Readers' Version to be more natural and fluent, including checking the metre/rhythym in Psalms and similar genres
5. Now recheck the Readers' Version for accuracy against the original texts
6. Work on the extra fields including character mark-up, footnotes, and cross-references.

So we're currently at stage #3 above.

Disclaimers

Translation distance marking

In our OET Readers' Version translation, we now attempt to mark up where we change it from a literal translation, e.g., if we change the 'The wealthy man says' to 'Wealthy people say' then we've made a change in number (i.e., from singular to plural) and we mark that. You can see the kinds of things that we annotate on our Formats page.

Anyway, the disclaimer is that we didn't do so much of that markup when we started on translating 'The Messianic Update' (the 'New Testament'), but we do intend to update that markup on the next pass through those documents/'books'.

Note: That additional markup will only be visible in online versions—only 'added' words will be visible in print versions (deemphasised in gray—not emphasied in italics like in older translations).