Alignment Checking will be done by the Church Network Delegates. These are people who are chosen by the church leaders in the language community. These people are first-language speakers of the target language, are knowledgeable about the Bible, and are persons whose opinions are respected by the church leaders. If possible, they should be people who are trained in biblical languages, biblical content, and translation principles. When these people affirm the translation, the church leaders will approve of the distribution and use of the translation among the people who know and respect them.
If these people do not exist in the language community, then the translation team may want to collaborate with Quality Checkers from outside the language community in order to do Alignment Checking. In this case, it may be necessary to prepare a backtranslation.
Those who do Alignment Checking should be other than the people who did the previous Accuracy Checking. Since Alignment Checking is also a form of accuracy checking, the translation will receive the maximum benefit if different people do each of these checks.
The purpose of Alignment Checking is to ensure that the translation accurately communicates the message of the original language texts and reflects the sound doctrine of the global Church throughout history and throughout the world. After Alignment Checking, the leaders of the churches that speak the target language can affirm that the translation is trustworthy for their people.
It is best if the leaders from every Church network in the language community can appoint or approve some of the people who will do the Alignment Checking. In that way, all of the church leaders will be able to affirm that the translation is trustworthy and useful for all of the churches of the community.
The tool that we recommend for Alignment Checking is the Alignment Tool in translationCore®. To learn how to use this tool, continue reading below.
If you are a Quality Checker (QC) and are using Alignment Checking as part of your checking process, go to Steps for Quality Checkers to see the rest of the QC checking process.
When you click on a verse in the menu list to open it, the words of that verse appear in a vertical list, ordered from top to bottom, just to the right of the list of chapters and verses. Each word is in a separate box. The words of the original language (Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic) text for that verse are also in separate boxes in a field to the right of the target language word list. There is a space under each of the original language word boxes outlined with a dotted line.
To drag a word, click and hold down the button as you move each word box of the target language into the space under the word box of the source (original) text that the word corresponds to. Drop the target language word by releasing the mouse button. When the target language word is over a word box of the original, the dotted outline will turn blue to let you know that the word will drop there. If you make a mistake or decide that the target word belongs somewhere else, simply drag it again to where it belongs. Target language words can also be dragged back to the list. If there are repeated words in a verse, make sure to drag only the words that correspond to that part of the meaning of the original language verse. Then drag the repeated words to the place in the original verse where that meaning is repeated. When the same target language word occurs more than once in a verse, each instance of the word will have a small superscript number after it. This number will help you to align each repeated target word to the correct original word in the correct order. * You may need to combine original language words and/or target language words in order to make groups of words that have equivalent meanings. The goal of aligning is to match the smallest group of target language words to the smallest group of original language words that have the same meaning.
When you have finished this process for a verse, it should be easy to see if there are words left over in either the target word bank or the original language pane.