Note: this article was originally posted in June 2014
Here’s something else that will be in 6.5.3 that you or others (particularly literacy workers) may find very helpful.
A week or so again, Bob Eaton of Sth Asia Group asked for the following feature – it’s a quick way to adapt little (or not so little) snippets of text.
1. Copy to the clipboard some text of the source language from somewhere else – such as a Paratext project, or it could be from a literacy book in the source language which needs to be translated into the target language.
2. Then switch to the running Adapt It, which has the project for adapting from that source language to the target language, currently open. (It doesn’t matter whether or not there is a document currently open in the main window – if there is, it will be hidden and automatically restored after this procedure is done.)
3. On the Tools menu, click: Adapt Clipboard Text
4. The document, if open, is then hidden and the main window cleared, and the clipboard’s source text is laid out in the main window as a temporary document ready for adapting. You then adapt it in the normal way – and the adaptations go into the Knowledge Base (KB) in the normal way – building up the KB as you work. See the screenshot below, I had copied to the clipboard a short phrase from your email text. You’ll also notice a temporary toolbar is put up as well – it has 3 buttons…
5. After adapting, (and if you want you can also add a free translation too), then click:
a) Adaptations button : the adaptation text will be gathered as a target text string, and placed on the clipboard (replacing the source text that was there),
b) And after that, or instead of that, click Free Translations button (that button won’t be enabled if there is no free translation within the temporary document) – and the free translation would be put on the clipboard. But of course, you can’t have both kinds of information on the clipboard at once – so deal with one type of text and paste it where you want to go, then go back to Adapt It and use the other button to get the other kind of text on to the clipboard, and go paste that where you want that material to go.
6) When done, click Close button – the extra toolbar goes away, and if a document was open earlier, it is restored to the screen unchanged ready for you to continue working within it. The text last put in the clipboard stays there, of course, until you explicitly remove it. So you can switch to some other application and paste it wherever you like – such as into a Paratext project, or into a literacy book you want to adapt into the target language, or into several places if that makes sense.
Literacy books don’t have chapters and verses, and typically have pictures and text mixed together. Manually getting the text of a literacy book into a document in order to adapt it within Adapt It is a tedious job – lots of copying and pasting of short text pieces, and even if you did it, the bits and pieces that were adapted have to be manually copied to the clipboard and pasted back into the book at the correct places.
But with this new feature, the process becomes very simple. Just have the literacy book open in the software used to produce it, select some text to be translated, copy it to the clipboard (but leave it selected in the literacy software application), switch to the running Adapt It which needs, of course, to have a project open which is appropriate for adapting between the languages involved in this process, use the Adapt Clipboard Text menu item to create the temporary document, translate it into the target text language, click the Adaptations button, then Close button, and switch back to the literacy book and Paste the resulting translation – the selected text is then replaced by the clipboard’s translation. Repeat the select-copy-adapt-paste process for each part of the literacy book, until done.