Introduction

Please introduce yourself here, if you haven't already.
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mcolburn
Posts: 3
Joined: September 18th, 2023, 2:00 pm

Introduction

Post by mcolburn »

Greetings!

My name is Michael Colburn. I am on my third career: 1) 13 years with the Wycliffe Bible Translators (Ogea New Testament, Papua New Guinea); 2) 24 years as a software developer and software product manager (US Department of the Interior); and 3) the last 10 years as a developer of tools for translators of the Eastern Orthodox Christian liturgical texts. These texts are heavily based on the LXX and the Greek NT, either quoting or alluding to them, and to early church fathers. They were mostly written between 200-1000 AD in atticized literary hellenistic Greek. So, I have to work on understanding Greek text ranging from the time of the development of the LXX to the medieval phase of Greek.

Every day, I spend time reading the Greek NT. I do not consider myself an expert in Greek and will always be a student.

I look forward to learning from the discussions on this forum.

-Michael
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4167
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
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Re: Introduction

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Welcome! I work at Biblica in Research & Development, and a lot of my work focuses on software and data for Bible translation teams.

Tell me about the tools you work on! Do you happen to know Joel Kalvesmaki?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
mcolburn
Posts: 3
Joined: September 18th, 2023, 2:00 pm

Re: Introduction

Post by mcolburn »

Sorry for the delay! No, I do not know him.

I joined B-Greek because of my interest in Biblical Greek. Because you asked me what kind of tools I create, I have to explain something about the Eastern Orthodox Church, in particular, what is called in the West the Byzantine rite.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has a cycle of daily prayers and services, e.g. Midnight Office, Matins (aka Orthros), First Hour, Third Hour, Six Hour, Nine Hour, Vespers, and Compline. There is both fixed and variable content for each service. A simple example of variable parts are the daily readings from the Gospel book (containing the four Gospels) and the Apostolos (containing the rest of the New Testament, but excluding Revelation, which though included in the canon is never read liturgically). The selection of readings, prayers, and hymns depend on the following variables: the day of the week, the service, the musical mode / tone of the week, the 11 week cycle of Eothinon (resurrectional Gospel readings), and what Biblical events ((e.g. the birth of Christ, His baptism, the transfiguration, etc.) or martyr or Saint is being commemorated. The rules for the selection of prayers and hymns are contained in a book known as the Typikon. The rules in the Typikon are used to select the appropriate sections from a variety of liturgical books: the lectionary (Prophetologion, Psalter, Gospel, Apostolos), Euchologion, Octoechos, Menaia, etc. The number of words in the Greek version numbers over a million. A Greek NT is about 5,300. So, the Greek liturgical text is orders of magnitudes larger than a Greek NT.

To see what the content of daily services, go to https://dcs.goarch.org. DCS means "Digital Chant Stand". It is created by Fr Seraphim Dedes, who uses one of the tools I developed.

Unlike Biblical translation, where today we have UBS translator's handbooks, exegetical commentaries, grammatically tagged Greek text, lexicons, and ParaText, etc., there are few resources to help translators of the Eastern Orthodox liturgical books.

My work with the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC) is to create tools to assist overseas translators of the Eastern Orthodox liturgical texts. I create three types of tools: 1) software tools to create exegetical resources for translators of Eastern Orthodox Christian liturgical books and texts: morphological, syntactic, and referential tagging of the Greek text; a tool to create a variety of types of notes about a word, phrase, or entire unit of source text (no larger than a single hymn or prayer); and a tool to generate a translator’s handbook for the translation unit; 2) a translation editor allowing the translator to view resources from #1 to understand the meaning of the source text, potential translation issues and how they might be addressed and enter their translation; and 3) software to generate a Digital Chant Stand (DCS) web site with liturgical books and daily services in combinations of up to three languages side-by-side along with musical scores and audio recordings. The books and services are available as both HTML and PDF files. The tools for #3 include, but are not limited to a database, templates created using a liturgical markup language (LML), and a website generator. The text in the database (hymns, prayers, litanies, pericopes for lectionary readings) do not contain formatting information. Formatting information and the order of the content for liturgical books and services are specified using LML.

I don’t think any of this is relevant to your work with Biblia, but if you want to know more or to see a demo, I can provide one.
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