Tools of the Trade: The iPad

At the end of May I purchased an Apple iPad to use in my classes.  I had been planning on getting a netbook, but when this was announced in January it got me thinking.  There are so many opportunities with a tablet that has a long battery life and an easy to use touch interface.

Computers are so useful to our work, but the goal is for local ownership and the work to be done by people from the language group.  Computers stand as a major obstacle.  A device like this could start to bridge the gap.

Back to the present…there are two ways that I am using the iPad for my coursework.  The first is for reading.  There are a lot of web pages and PDF’s that I have to read, and doing it sitting in an easy chair from a tablet is so much better than leaning over my computer screen.  The second way is for my course on Human Computer Interactions.  There are two usability tests that we must conduct and I have chosen to do both of them on the iPad using iWork Pages.  The first is a heuristic evaluation.  The second is a participatory test with three people.  I am doing both tests from the perspective of somebody who does not have much computer background. 

My heuristic evaluation can be downloaded here: iWork Pages on the iPad - An Heuristic Usability Evaluation.

This blog entry will be added to as I have more thoughts to share (and time to share them).  I am very excited about the possibilities presented by this device.  I don’t know that Apple is the best way to go because of restrictions that they apply to the device, but this is a device that is incredibly easy and fun to use.  I am anxious to see what other companies do to answer.

Tools of the Trade: The Internet

You don’t truly appreciate something until you lose it. We lost our satellite internet system from August 15th until September 28th and it quickly became very obvious how much we use the internet. It has also prompted this post on the Internet as a Translation Tool. This loss of a good connection is also why it has taken so long since my last post.

First, I want to cover some of the more practical day to day needs that may be obvious. Our largest use is email. This ranges from keeping in touch with family to updating our partners to communicating with our office in the US. Email is the one thing that we have to be able to do even when everything else does not work.

Another day to day need is keeping our antivirus programs up to date. At first this may seem circular as viruses are mostly spread via the internet so it is like saying we need internet access to fight things that come from the internet. I have worked on computers in a village that are powered from a solar system that have never been connected to the internet that stil have viruses. It seems that people have just enough access to get viruses (USB drives taken to internet cafés miles away) but not enough access to get antivirus updates. If I can keep the antivirus programs updated then I spend less time cleaning infected computers and more time doing other work.

Second is keeping our programs updated. This is not as critical as antivirus updates, but still very helpful. Keeping Microsoft Windows and Office updated gives us a more stable working environment. Keeping language software up to date gives us new features that make the work easier to do. We are better able to interact with the developers to add features that we need, whether they are in the US, Papua New Guinea, or anywhere else in the world.

Third, there is the problem that a computer person cannot know how to fix every possible problem that a computer experiences. Sometimes it as simple as looking up an error message that a program is exhibiting. This alone saves hours if not days of troubleshooting. Recently a computer came in that was having a problem with its screen backlight. Normally I would not have been able to do anything about this and would have had to condemn the computer to being useless. But I was able to research the problem online and find out that the specific symptoms pointed to a problem with the LCD inverter which costs $15. Thirty minutes online and $15 and a useless computer can be used again.

Fourth, internet access has had several very direct affects on translation work. Consultants and translators are in the same place for only a few weeks a year. At other times they may be several hours away or even in another country or on another continent. With internet access, they are able to send portions of scripture back and forth and hold long distance conversations.

In August we were able to take this ability to a whole new level. The Nkonya New Testament was being typeset in preparation for publication. Although the text had already been thoroughly checked, during the typesetting process each page has to be read several times to make sure no errors have been introduced. Normally the typesetter, the expatriate translator and the national translator are all in the same room over the course of a month or more. In this case, this group was separated over thousands of miles. Wes Peacock was in Dallas with Darrel, the typesetter. His wife Katie was in Canada with family. Emmanuel, an Nkonya man, was in Tamale with me. Each day as a section was done by the typesetter, Wes and Darrel would email it to Katie and Emmanuel to read over it. They responded with comments via email or Skype. This new ability is even more important as after 9/11 it is becoming more difficult for our national coworkers to get visas to the US or UK where a lot of our typesetting is done. You will note from the dates above that the Nkonya typesetting was going on while our VSAT was down. This did make things much more difficult and creative solutions had to be found, but with the Lord’s help, the work progressed.

There are a couple of articles that you may want to read as follow-up. The first is from a series that my wife is writing on our life and expectations when we first came to Ghana and what reality is now. She has recently written a post on our internet access. The second is a story from ABC on how slow internet access is in Africa. A company in South Africa was actually able to transfer data 50 miles faster via carrier pigeon than via their internet connection.

Computers and Translation

When we started with Partnership Development a question often came up when people found out I was a computer guy working with a Bible Translation organization, “Do computers do the translation?”

We see programs that help us learn another language. We see programs that even translate from one language to another. During a Google search, if a resulting page is in another language an offer is made to translate the page for us. If Google can do this for free, then why are we spending so much time and money sending missionaries to translate the Bible?

Because computers do not do translation. Computers are inherently dumb and know nothing unless you tell them. Major languages such as English, French, German, and Chinese have been studied and analyzed for centuries. Over the course of decades highly trained professionals have taken what we know about these languages and written programs that convert the words and sentence structure from one major language to another. Even with all of this work, there are still some interesting sentences that come across. We have all read instruction manuals that were obviously written in another language and translated into English such as the following instructions for using headphones: (1) Please tune up power volume to aproposity, before put it into the jeck (2) Take for you clothing the plastic.

Imagine if that was Scripture? We want people to fully understand what they are reading. In the languages that we work with often no linguistic analysis has ever been done. It is faster and much more accurate to do the translation manually than to try to program a computer to do it for you. I will note though that in cases of strongly related languages, programs such as CARLA (Computer Assisted Related Language Adaptation) have been developed to do the initial translation. These are initial translations that still need a lot of work.

I think that some confusion comes in because people think of translation as simply a word for word replacement. If the English word is “rock” then we find the word for rock in the local language and substitute it and move on to the next word. Translation is much more complex than that. To illustrate this, below is an example of a back translation. During consultant checking, translators provide a word for word translation from the local language back into English. The example below is Hebrews 1:1-2 from Sekpele which just dedicated their New Testament in April 2009.

Sekpele: Koko lefee, Onanto édi bo banamǝ etiki sesia sesia sesia, nya lǝ esu kpǝ ǝsuǝ tsyaa, ɛyɛ lǝ wǝ bǝnyɛlǝkǝtidi ǝsuǝ. Fɛɛ, lǝ eyi fɛfɛ nyamfo ǝsuǝǝ, údi bo etiki ɛyɛ lǝ Wǝ Ubi ǝsuǝ. Wǝ ǝsuǝ Onanto lɛyɛ úyifo kawunsiǝ, nya wǝ ni nwǝ Onanto dílǝkǝ nkǝ udi wǝ bikǝ kenke nɛ.

English word for word: Past time, God ate our ancestors words many times, and in ways many in too, it pass through his prophets on. But, in theses last these on, he ate us words it pass through His Child on. He on God walked he did world, and he is who God selected that he eats his property all so.

English Standard Version (ESV): Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

I am sure that you had trouble understanding the word for word translation. Some of this was because of a different word order in the sentence. Some was because of a different word than we may choose to use. When was the last time that you described an heir as one who “eats the property”?

There are three things that we refer to as the ABC’s of translation. It must be Accurate, Beautiful, and Clear. Although the word for word translation above could be considered accurate, it is neither beautiful nor clear. To get this result, each translation team needs at least the following members:

Exegete: This person’s job is find the meaning of the original text. This Biblical Scholar will spend many hours doing research before a single verse is translated. They will spend time with Bible Commentaries and translation aids and depending on their training will often delve into the original Greek or Hebrew text. It requires not only an understanding of the words of the text, but also the culture and events around when the words were written or spoken.

Linguist: This person needs to understand how the local language works. This spans from obvious things like word order, spelling, and grammatical markings to less obvious issues like discourse analysis and poetry. Each language has different styles of speaking depending on context. A simple example is that if I start out by saying “Once upon a time…” you will know immediately that I am about to tell you a fairy tale. Of course the Bible is no fairy tale, but it goes to show that when a language incorporates certain conventions to show what kind of text will follow, we need to use that in the translation.

Anthropologist: This person needs to understand the local culture. Culture and language are two sides of the same coin. Take for example a people group in the Philippines whose livelihood depends on the sea and fishing. They have 36 verbs for fishing. A single word means fishing at night with a night and using a lantern. The opposite was true of the Kuwaa people that my parents worked with in Liberia. They had no large bodies of water and so therefore no word for boat. The process of translating Jesus telling the disciples to cast their nets on the other side of the boat would be completely different for these two languages.

Of course each of these areas could use a lot more explanation, but I think my point is clear. Translation is about much more than substituting one word for another and is not done by a computer, although computers have become indispensable in the process.

Frankly, no computer ever built is smart enough to translate the Word of God. Translation takes an understanding of Scripture that a computer will never have. Only a human can experience the saving power of the gift given to us by Christ’s death and resurrection, and only a human can communicate that to another human.

I am grateful that I can use my knowledge and skills with computers to help others work on Translation, Literacy and Scripture Engagement. Stay tuned for more blog entries about various software programs that I support to enable other workers in God’s kingdom to accomplish their tasks. You may also want to take a look at Rev. Nathan Esala’s blog post on what is involved in translation from a translator’s perspective in “The Translator is Translating”.

AVG Update Script

The constant struggle that IT people face in Africa is that there seems to be just enough internet availability for viruses to spread rapidly, but not enough internet availability to get the tools to fight the viruses.  USB drives are excellent ways of sharing information and of course viruses go with it.  Some of our language project staff are able to get to an Internet Cafe where they pick up a virus and then take it back to the office where it proceeds to infect all of the other computers.

Getting antivirus updates to those same computers has proven a bit more difficult.  On one hand it is impossible to get all of the project computers to the Internet Cafe to update them.  On the other the update files you could get off of AVG's website are way too large (about 40MB) to be able to realistically download over these slow connections.

At the same time that I was considering these problems, we upgraded to the AVG 8.5 administrator console and update server.  This update server is strictly a proxy server and so will only download an update file if a computer requests it.  We have computers that come in from remote offices and project offices so we need the larger updates.  Our internet connection overnight is faster and can handle the large files, but during the day this was difficult, so we need to download the large files at night.

So as any good network administrator would do, I wrote a script.  It uses an excellent little program called WGet to download the AVG update control files.  Then it parses the files to find the updates that are for a computer that is about two weeks out of date.  Back to WGet to download these files over a slow and unreliable connection.

The script can handle the following types of updates:

(f) Full - This is a full download of the virus definition updates.  Use this update on new installations of AVG or on a computer that has not been updated in quite a while.  You may want to run this about once a month just to make sure that all of the machines are updating well. This download is approximately 40MB but is getting bigger every day.

(p) Program - This is a program only update.  AVG releases program updates on a semi-regular basis.  These updates are important as they may increase AVG's ability to find viruses in ways that it could not do before.  You should run this update about once a month. This download is approximately 40MB.

(w) Weekly Partial - This is a subset of the virus definition updates that are downloaded in (f) above.  Because it is a partial download the file size is much smaller.  These should be done at least once a week or at a minimum every two weeks.  If you have gone for more than two weeks without doing a "Weekly Partial" update, then you should do the full update above.  This download is approximately 2MB. 

It can also be modified to help the AVG proxy server by downloading several of the smaller files at off-peak hours.  There are instructions for this in the README file.

The script can be downloaded below for either AVG Network Edition or AVG Free.  It is designed to be able to be run from a pen drive taken to an Internet Cafe or as a scheduled task on a server.

AVG Update Script - Network Edition
AVG Update Script - Free 

What is Unicode

Over the course of the past year I have found myself explaining Unicode many times.  I have written various introductions for different groups.  While I was just in Liberia I put together a introduction for LIBTRALO and decided to post it on my blog for all who may be interested.  You can download also download a better designed version of this article from What is Unicode.pdf.

To understand what Unicode is, we need to understand how computers think. They only think in numbers. Letters are just a representation for humans of what the numbers are. These numbers are the codes for the corresponding letter.

Since the inception of computers there have been many standards for how letters should be coded. The problem is that each was designed for a specific major language. Each of these legacy standards could only handle a maximum of 256 characters.

People who worked in minority languages, as LIBTRALO does, had to develop their own standards and in so doing created uniquely modified fonts. This worked fine within a language group, but data was not able to be shared outside of that group without also passing along the necessary fonts and keyboards. Sometimes even two organizations that were working in the same language were not able to share their files.

To combat these problems a new system has been developed to create a distinct code for every character in every language in the world. Unicode has a place for more than 16 million different characters.

All of this is to say that, with Unicode, there is now a level playing field. Unicode is an international standard. It allows data to be shared among various organizations in Liberia and throughout the world. Once the linguistic analysis is done in a given language the information can then be shared with missionaries and other organizations working in similar languages.

Benefits of Unicode:

• As a well developed international standard it works across almost all computer programs and operating systems throughout the world. Something that is typed in Microsoft Word on a Windows computer in Liberia can be read in OpenOffice on a Macintosh in China. Information can be easily shared. It even works on the internet so web pages can be published in any language.
• Because it is an international standard, there are more choices available to us when we develop materials using Unicode. We are not limited to one font, but now have many choices. The best ones are from SIL, but even companies like Microsoft and Adobe are now developing very nice fonts that display Liberian characters.
• Unicode improves our ability to archive. It used to be that when you archived a document, you had to make sure that you saved the specific font with that document so that it could be read. Now, if the file is saved using Unicode you can be sure that when it is opened again by somebody else it will be readable.
• Unicode is not simply about how a character looks. It also knows what a character is. Take for example the “ɔ”. In Unicode it is stored as character number U+0254 which is also known as a “LATIN_SMALL_LETTER_OPEN_O”. Linguistic analysis tools know that this is a vowel and what sound it makes.

More Information:
The Unicode Consortium (http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html)
Non-Roman Script Initiative (http://scripts.sil.org/unicode)
Keyboard Manager (http://www.tavultesoft.com)

All Things Technical

Paul has a blog...and pigs really do fly.  Those who know me well know of my great disgust with writing.  I once wrote a program equivalent to four pages of code in college in order to keep from writing a page and a half essay.  I had to get married so that my family could finally find out what was happening in my life.  It is no secret that our partners hear from us because of Ali.

So why do I have a blog?

You will note the title of this entry "All Things Technical".  That is really the title of my blog.   On day to day issues I don't have a lot to write about.  But on technology I have many opinions.  I have also come across some interesting fixes that I want to share with others.  Initially you will see articles about virus cleaning, AVG updates and other virus related issues because that has been a big part of my job lately.  

So don't settle in with a cup of coffee to read any warm and fuzzy stories.  This blog is all business.