[sword-devel] Fwd: Chinese Texts

Steve Tang sword-devel@crosswire.org
Mon, 4 Nov 2002 05:22:39 -0700 (MST)


Gentlemen,

This is from the same group whose director contacted me a few weeks ago. I
will keep in touch with them and report any progress.

The story I know is that they thought e-Sword was very nice. But after
contacting the author they found out that incorporating Chinese material
is not enjoying high priority. Therefore they went back on searching for a
way to distribute free Chinese materials.

There are also, in my knowledge, other efforts. IMHO project like Sword is
a good tool, if nothing else, to start from. After spending my own efforts
on this for about 10 years, I personally will only contribute to open
source projects like ours.

On Sun, 3 Nov 2002, Martin Gruner wrote:

> Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 20:47:49 +0100
> From: Martin Gruner <mg.pub@gmx.net>
> Reply-To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
> To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
> Subject: [sword-devel] Fwd: Chinese Texts
> 
> Today I received an interesting email about Chinese text projects on the 
> internet. I guess it is at least interesting for Steve and Christian, maybe 
> for other people who want to make good Chinese material available.
> Hope it is useful.
> 
> Martin
> 
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
> From:           	"Vincent Yang" <vyang@ccim.org>
> To:             	"'Patrick McIntyre'" <signs@centurytel.net>,
>  <palm@axios.de>, "'Dr. Fai Cheng'" <faisoft@faisoft.com>
> Subject:        	FW: Please join Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization
>  Project Date sent:      	Wed, 30 Oct 2002 00:59:30 -0800
> 
> Dear Brothers and Sisters:
> 
> 
> 
> I found out about your projects related to Chinese Bible in my old email
> archive.  So I think you might be interested to know about this bible
> text sources update.  If you can compare our code with your sources
> code, it will help both of us to correct any errors in the sources.
> 
> 
> 
> God Bless his WORD.
> 
> 
> 
> Vincent Yang
> 
> Webmaster@ccim.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vincent Yang [mailto:vyang@ccim.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 12:44 AM
> To: webmaster@immanuel.net; vincent_leung@exodusis.com;
> ibshk@ibs.org.hk; ftang@netscape.com; webmaster@antioch.com.sg
> Cc: kjlai@attbi.com; mikeguo@hotmail.com; webmaster@ccim.org;
> webservant@o-bible.com
> Subject: Please join Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization Project
> 
> 
> 
> Dear Brothers and Sisters:
> 
> 
> 
> I collected your name from CCIM Bible resource link pages
> http://www2.ccim.org/~bible/blink.html.
> 
> 
> 
> I would like to report a new update for our Chinese Bible Source code,
> would like to invite you to take a look and see if that can benefit your
> project.  Also, I would like to invite you to consider join this
> project, although I have not figure out the best approach yet.
> 
> 
> 
> This bible text version are completely free for any Christian website,
> you are welcome to forward to anyone or any site might be interested
> update their sources.
> 
> 
> 
> If you have any suggestion, feedback, bug report, please send to me for
> now, and if God lead more people to involve in this project, we will
> setup an email alias, and also setup some source control tools to
> coordinate this project.
> 
> 
> 
> God Bless His WORD!
> 
> 
> 
> Vincent Yang
> 
> vyang@ccim.org
> 
> Oct. 2002
> 
> 
> 
>   _____
> 
> 
> Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization Project
> 
> 
> Released: Sunday October 20, 2002
> Contact: vyang@ccim.org (Temporary)
> URL: http://vyang.ccim.org/bible/ChineseBibleProject.htm (Temporary)
> Download: http://vyang.ccim.org/bible/bibleproject.zip (Temporary)
> 
> 
> Overview:
> 
> 
> There are several Chinese Bible sites available on internet.  Most of
> them use Union Bible Version from an previous version created by
> pioneers who typed in manually or converted using OCR program.  We
> obtained three versions from ccim.org, O-bible.org and BST 2.0.  The
> goal is to create a consolidated version Chinese Union Code Base, to
> provide standardized version for Chinese communities.  We get it for
> free, and will provide it for free.
> 
> This release fixed all the errors caught by comparing three different
> versions.  Most importantly, we fixed most of the characters out of
> normal BIG5 or GB character set, ie. we removed any characters in
> extended Chinese character sets.
> 
> Further work might be needed to standardize on symbols, signs, as well
> as he/she/it/HE, etc.
> 
> We used Chinese Union - English NIV Bible, published by Hymnody and
> Bible House, @1990, Sixth Printing May 1993 as our exclusive reference.
> 
> 
> Sources:
> 
> 
> Original data file came from three sources:
> 
> http://bible.ccim.org
> http://www.o-bible.org/
> http://www.holyseed.org/bst
> 
> Special thanks to Brother San Lin and Jason Chan for providing the data
> files.  Without them, this project would not be possible.  Praise the
> Lord.
> 
> 
> Package Contents:
> 
> 
> ccim_b5.txt:
> 
> BIG5 Version text in CCIM.org & O-Bible.ORG format.
> 
> 
> ccim_gb.txt:
> 
> GB version text in CCIM.ORG & O-Bible.ORG format.
> 
> 
> ChineseBibleProject.htm:
> 
> This readme HTML
> 
> 
> What's changed, and what's not?
> 
> 
> We searched for errors mostly by compare text files.  We use Perl and
> windiff.exe as main tools; use WORD for editing because it's much faster
> than notepad and also its great support for both GB and BIG5 encoding
> and converting.
> 
> We fixed: mostly typo, and misused characters, especially in Simplified
> vs. Traditional cases, and extended characters ranges, missed or extra
> characters.
> 
> We did not change: signs and symbols, he/she/it/HIM, the commenting
> style, and several special characters that was not distinguishable in
> ancient Chinese, for example, character for "where" and "there".
> 
> 
> Next steps:
> 
> 
> The first step is to pass these updated files to known Chinese Bible
> hosting sites and software venders.  Even if they could not use it
> directly, they might compare to their file, and benefit from the fixed
> we caught in this release.
> 
> After that, if God permits, we will start an open source project to have
> more brothers and sisters contribute to this project.  I envision an
> virtual group to collaborate on this effort, and we need better software
> tools to merge and verify changes from different members.
> 
> If you are interested or have comments for this project, please send to
> the contact email above.  I will create an email group, likely on
> yahoogroup, to distribute the email.
> 
> Please keep us in your prayer.  Praise to the Highest!
> 
> 
> Participate Sites:
> 
> 
> http://bible.ccim.org
> http://www.o-bible.org
> 
> 
> ------- End of forwarded message -------
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 

Steve Tang...