Note: this article was originally posted in January 2015

  1. Launch Adapt It.
  2. Click OK to dismiss the “Welcome to Adapt It” window. (You might not see this window – it is possible to request it not be shown. Preferences > View page allows you to later have showing it turned back on, if showing it has been turned off.)
  3. You are now at the “Choose a Project” page. The list, however, will not have any projects to choose, it will just show you the item: <New Project>
    Click that item, and then click the Next> button.
  4. You will see a “Define Source and Target Language Names” page of the wizard. Here, in the top left box, you type the name of the language for the source text – the already existing text data which is the material you want to translate. Usually it is scripture data, but it does not have to be – it can be any language data – such as literacy materials. In the box underneath that, you type the name of the language you want to translate into.
    The names you type can be any names meaningful to you. There is no special format, and typing spaces between words is acceptable. Adapt It will use what you type to form a longer “project name” which will have the form: <source> to <target> adaptations, where <source> and <target> represent whatever you type into the two left-hand boxes.
    It is not necessary, but is definitely recommended that you do so, to type the correct Ethnologue language code in the two right hand text boxes. The Ethnologue codes are 3-letter codes for each of the world’s languages. They come from an international standard, ISO639-3, which SIL International maintains. There are older 2-letter codes, from the international ISO639-1 standard, for a couple of hundred of the world’s languages. If the language has a valid 2-letter code, such as en for English, then the 2-letter code must be used rather than a 3-letter code for that language (English has eng in the 639-3 standard, but en in the 639-1 standard. Only use the 2-letter code en. That is not a rule from Adapt It, but from the international body which maintains oversight of these standards.)
    If you know the right code for each language, type them in to the appropriate boxes. If you don’t know what codes to use, click the Lookup Codes button, you will see a dialog, type the language name you want looked up, and click the Find Language button. If the language name is short, it might be part of other language names, if so, keep clicking the Find Language button until the correct language is selected. Make a note of the code. Or you can use the “Use selected code for….” buttons to cause the code to be moved to the correct box at the bottom of the dialog – or type it manually there yourself.
    When you’ve looked up both codes, click the OK button. The codes will then appear in the parent dialog’s text boxes.
    A comment about dialects. Not every dialect has an Ethnologue code. Adapt It supports the use of the international RFC5646 language codes, especially the “custom codes” section of that standard. You define custom codes yourself. They occur after the ethologue code, must commence with -x- and then what follows is your custom code which must be lower case, containing no spaces, and be a meaningful sequence of up to 8 letters. For example if there are upriver and downriver dialects of a language with ethnologue code qrt, then you might use the following as the codes you need: qrt-x-upriv and qrt-x-downriv
    It would be your responsibility then to tell others what codes to use for those dialects, and nice if you try to get the names accepted into the rfc5646 standard.Note: using no code at all is allowed. Adapt It will work perfectly well doing translation by adaptation without them. (Some of Adapt It’s optional features do require them. An xhtml export, or a Pathway export, will each require that a valid code is present. You can add the codes later on if you wish.)

    Click the Next> button when you have finished with this page of the wizard.

  5. The next pages of the wizard will take you through options for fonts, punctuation correspondences (add at the bottom of the punctuation lists, any extra punctuation characters which may be required and which are not part of the English character set), upper-lower case correspondences (click both checkboxes if the languages have the upper and lower case distinction in their writing system), the USFM mark-up setting (don’t change anything on this page), and then the Document page where you can create your first document.
    I won’t discuss each of the above pages, mostly you can just accept the default options. (You can later alter your choices in the Preferences… choice on the Edit menu, if necessary.) I’ll just mention the Document page in the next step.
  6. Document page. This is the last page of the wizard. It is also the page that shows if you later, within your project, click File > Open…, or File > New… to open an existing file for further work, or to create a new adaptation document, respectively.
    When you have just created a project, there will be no adaptation documents shown in the list. You’ll just see, selected, the top list item: <New Document>
    Click that if it is not selected, then click the Finish button.
    Adapt It will display a File Open dialog, where you can navigate to the plain text source file from which you will create your adaptation document. (Internally that file must be just plain text, the encoding UTF-8 is best, and it may have, or not have, USFM mark-up as well – things like \v for verse and \c for chapter, and so forth.)
    Select the file, and click Open. Adapt It will then parse in the file’s text, and lay it out as the source text in Adapt It’s main window. The phrasebox, where you will do the adapting, will be at the first adaptable location ready for you to commence your translating work.

These instructions take you only as far as creating your first project and first document. How to do the adapting work is covered elsewhere. Look at the “Adapt It Quick Start” reference document in the Adapt It group, from the Windows Start button. It lists common work procedures. Also look at the tutorial available there.

Making your first Project and first Document within that Project