Find All Translations Without a Word?

[Brett K.]

Another NOT search usecase. I was asked if there were any Bible translations that did not use the word "alien(s)" at all—zero times. I opened a research window and searched all texts for "<NOT> alien". Of course, that returned nothing.

The bottom line is that I had to go a pretty round about way to get the information. There were a handfull of translations that did not use the word at all, but I couldn't find an automated way for Accordance to get this information. I had to find all of the translations that did have it, then manually look for the ones that weren't on the list.

Am I missing something? Is there an easy way to do this?

Thanks

 

--

Brett

[Michael Hunt]

What about using an article search such as "the <NOT> alien"

[Brett K.]

I tried that exact search and it found every translation since they all had "the". I don't know why the <NOT> had no effect.

[Ken Simpson]

It found every verse that had ‘the’ in it but not ‘alien’. So a heck of a lot of verses.

[Mark Allison]

I'm not sure of a way to find all the translations that don't have a word. But a search for  *@alien? will find all the translations that have the word. I have a Group that contains all the most commonly-used English translations. A search on a limited number of texts makes it easier to find the texts that are excluded.

[ukfraser]

Brett, this has sparked off an interesting discussion with my wife and i wondered why you want to do this? Apparently there is an article in the church Times about little green people.

 

The niv uses alien once in psalm 28. The kjv uses it 8 times, the translators of the esv have used alien 9 times, the jps translators 48 times and out ahead are the nrsv translators with 138 times, but none of these have used it in ps 28.

 

Not my best purchase but dave brunn's book one bible, many translations, are all translations created equal? got me thinking. Not least i should probably have got fee and strauss' book how to choose a translation for all its worth instead (but have now that i see it in accordance as part of the store wide offerhttps://www.accordancebible.com/store/details/?pid=How+To-Translation&cart_action=add&cart_type=cart&cart_pid=How+To-Translation#How_To-Translation).

 

;o)

Edited August 6, 2017 by ukfraser

[Brett K.]

Nothing like that. A friend said there were certain words in different translations that he didn't like or distracted him. He said, in his mind, when he sees "alien" it immediately jumps to the little green men. So he wanted to know which translations did not use "alien" at all.

I discovered that cannot be accomplished with a single, simple Accordance search like "<NOT> alien" [flex]. So I had to find all that did have alien then manually see which ones were missing out of the list.

BTW, the NRSV uses it the most and the NLT doesn't use it at all.

[ukfraser]

Thanks, that sounds very similar to what the newspaper article is about.

 

;o)

[ukfraser]

Church times article for anyone who is interested.

 

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/21-july/news/uk/niv-gets-in-more-beer-but-dumps-aliens

 

Hope next version also has the turbo tagging.

Edited August 6, 2017 by ukfraser