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Information Notes

There are occasions where your intention is not to have a conversation with other team members regarding a translation issue; but rather, to document or justify a decision made. Often these are for the benefit of the consultant who will later review the work, or for future daughter translators who might wish to understand the exegesis of the front translation.

Information Note Example

It is generally the advisor, rather than the translator, who creates these Information notes, and so by default the ability to insert and edit them is turned off (because OurWord's default audience is the translator, not the advisor.) So when OurWord encounters such a note, it is by default displayed as a simple, uneditable note as illustrated here.

Information Note Example

If you wish to create these Information notes, first go to the Configuration dialog (in the Tools menu), and from there, select the Notes tab from the list to the left. You will then see a setting "Can create Information notes?", which you should set to "Yes."

Information Note Example

The result of this is that when you insert a note (which you do the normal way via the Insert command), you will now have "Information" as a choice in the dropdown where you assign the note to someone. By assigning the note to "Information", you are declaring to OurWord that it is this special type of Information note; and it thus will appear as the non-editable, balloon-style note above to consultants and others who later examine it. That is, to you these notes will be editable; and in fact you and other advisors can optionally interact on it just like with other notes. But to those for whom this setting is turned off, it will not be editable, and only the initial message within the note will be shown.

Contextual Display

Information notes are not considered relevant to the translator as he is drafting the vernacular, and therefore are only visible in the Back Translation and Consultant Preparation views. If, however, you have turned on the ability to edit Information notes as described above, then they will appear to you in all views. We assume that if you wish to edit these notes, then they should be available to you in every context.

It is also possible to see Information notes that were written in the Front translation, by using the four-column Consultant Preparation view. Consultants unfamiliar with OurWord will need to understand that when a daughter translation follows a front, that the justification for an exegesis may well exist in a note that resides only in the Front translation. That is, because OurWord displays both Front and Daughter Information notes in the four-column view, it should not be necessary to copy Front notes into the daughter translation in order to explain an exegesis to the consultant (unless, of course, the daughter has followed a different exegesis.)

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