Boosting corpus size for endangered languages

I've written several previous posts about methods for wrangling Bible translation material into Translation Editor and then into FLEx.  For an endangered language where there is an existing Bible translation, the amount of corpus material that can be added is fairly astonishing.

I ran the stats today on the Copala Triqui project today, and I think the numbers tell the story.   Within about 1/2 of the New Testament 'wrangled' into FLEx, the current project has around 100,000 words in it.

If we don't want to look at the translated material, we can filter it out by the Choose Texts menu:

(BTW, I made some mistake in genre type for the first few bits of Matthew that I experimented with, so don't show up in the Bible genre.  I could easily uncheck these as well, and at some point I will figure out what I have done wrong :-) )

If you filter out all the Bible material, the corpus is about 9,000 words:

A brief note -- Triqui is written in two orthographies (a practical one and a phonetic one).  The stats keep track of how many words are in each orthography as well as the total overall.

More options for using Bible translations for language study

I have been intrigued for a while now by the possibility of using available Bible translations as a way to study languages.  For many Native American languages, Bible translation are  the longest available texts, and they have lots of valuable information about the lexicon and syntax.  (Of course we have to consider their origin as translations.)

I've been exploring the websites that make some of these materials available, and recently investigated an option that was new to me -- a piece of Bible study software called the Word.  Various testaments are available in a format compatible with the Word, as in this screenshot:

I downloaded the free software the Word, and installed it, along with New Testaments in Copala Triqui and Itunyoso Triqui.  The software lets you put any number of translations side by side:

One potential advantage of using this program as an intermediary between online Bible materials and FLEx -- the Word has fairly sophisticated way to manipulate the Bible text.  For example, it can display or omit the verse numbers, paragraph breaks, footnotes, chapter numbers, etc.

For adding text to Translation Editor (and then looking at it in FLEx), the best option seems to be verse numbers, but no paragraph breaks.  On the File | Copy Verses menu, this is option #10:

After you click the Copy button, you can paste the text in this format anywhere you like.  You can get the English translation into the same format and paste them into the Back Translation column of Translation Editor:

Then there is only one more step before you are ready for analysis in FLEx.  The numbers in both the Triqui and the translation need to be in Verse Number format, and we want a paragraph break before each verse number in the Triqui:

Once in this form, you can look at the text in FLEx (via Tools | Back translation | Use Interlinear Text Tool) and begin ordinary analysis.