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" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Patrick McIntyre'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "'Dr. Fai Cheng'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Vincent Yang [mailto:vyang@;ccim.org] Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 12:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Oct. 2002 _____ Chinese Union Bible Source Standardization Project Released: Sunday October 20, 2002 Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (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 ------- -------------------------------------------------------
