Compare Texts - Hits Only

[Robb B]

Today I was doing a little investigation into the gender-neutral issue with the NIV/TNIV, so I did a search of the NIV for every occurrence of 'he.' In this instance it would be nice to be able to filter a list of text differences to show only differences where the hit word is involved. Any chance of seeing this in a future update/version?

 

Thanks for listening!

[Joe Weaks]

As you know, Robb, the answer is no. I'm not sure how the restrictor would be defined. I do think a helpful, easy change in the Compare feature would be an option to ignore whitespace (what purpose does it serve to see the deletions of tabbed formatting from one version to another?).

 

Another way of going about looking at some of the changes from "he" to something else in TNIV would be to

Open up an NIV search window

Open a new TNIV search window

Search for [Contents NIV] <NOT> he

Open up another pane with NIV

Enable compare

 

This will find ever verse where NIV has "he" but TNIV does not. It will not find every change, but it will find 872 verses that make a good sample for reading through, devoid of any false positives.

What's nice about that is you could also expand your list: he, men, man, He-man (ok, that one probably isn't in there). Of course, at that point, it'd be better to go with Greek terms.

 

 

Of course, since the occurrence of "he" is an abstraction where most of the time there is no underlying Greek word, precise searching isn't possible. Also, it's good to remember that TNIV has other kinds of updated translation in addition to attention to correcting unnecessarily narrowed gender semantic domains.

[Robb B]

As you know, Robb, the answer is no. I'm not sure how the restrictor would be defined.

 

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a pretty simple update to me. When the list of differences is run, it would apply a filter to that list to only show places where 'he' is the word or included in a phrase of the search text. Again, I don't know anything about how the list is generated or the underlying code of the search texts and compare texts features, so I might be severely over-simplifying the case.

 

Also, it's good to remember that TNIV has other kinds of updated translation in addition to attention to correcting unnecessarily narrowed gender semantic domains.

 

"Correcting" and "unncessarily," huh? I suppose this is not the place to engage in such a debate, but if it was, I would have to call attention to and correct this unnecessary bias, subtle though it may have been.

[Joe Weaks]

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a pretty simple update to me. When the list of differences is run, it would apply a filter to that list to only show places where 'he' is the word or included in a phrase of the search text.

Robb,

Of course a filter where only "marked words" are marked with comparison highlighting, at least on the search text end... that wouldn't be hard or ambiguous. Even with the functionality, your study would still be incomplete, so not sure I'd value such a functionality (in terms of development resources). Just my opinion (one of many you might take exception with, apparently).