This project was initiated to compare English and Cherokee versions of the New Testament for the self-education of vocabulary and basic grammer of the Cherokee language.
The images have been parsed into single verse units and are viewed as single chapters loaded onto its own web page. All of these images have been transcribed into UTF-8.
Remember, this is a translated text, there is a high probability that some verses may not translate well or make perfect grammatical sense. Don't assume this to be the ulitmate reference of the Cherokee language. The version of the English New Testament was chosen purely by convenience and the grammer or wording may not match the Cherokee as well as other English versions. The English version was chosen because, as a text document, each verse was on it's own line, regardless of how long of a verse it was. This made it very easy for me to write code to break it down into individual verses. I sure wasn't going to cut and paste all that.
Do not trust the transcription currently posted to be correct. A preliminary check found that 15% of the verses have a typo. Some verses have been proofread and corrected, but not all. I am proofreading on average 20 verses a day. Not all corrected verses appear on the site immediately. Proofreading won't be done until around the summer of 2011.
If you are wanting to submit to the site, contact me at the e-mail at the bottom of the page. While most of the work is in proofreading, there are technical problems that still have to be sorted out.
Hear the verses spoken
For $2 you can 'adopt' a verse and I will record a fluent Cherokee speaker and have the MP3 file on the website for you to listen to! This is also a guarantee that the verse is proofread. For every $2, the speaker is given $1, the rest to pay off the recording equipment and paypal fees.
Donating in higher increments gives us a better rate in paypal fees. $2 = 36 cents, $10 = 59 cents, $20 = 88 cents. If you want an entire chapter of about 50 verses, $100 = $3.20, which is about 1/10th the fee of one verse.
Since a recording session involves a 650 mile drive, there are only going to be six sessions per year. It may be several weeks before your verse is recorded and online. After making the contribution, you need to let me know which verses you want to hear and send them to the e-mail address in large print below. Each verse image has a 6-digit number in the name. If you have those handy, that makes it easier for me. The next recording session is August 28, 2010.
Sponsoring a recording does not entail ownership of the recording. All recordings are released as public domain media, free for all people to enjoy and use, for any purpose. All donations and transactions will be posted online for transparency; all donations respect your privacy unless you request otherwise.
After spending about 100 to 150 hours over the past year trying to find a way to use TeX, or one of the splinter projects (LaTeX, XeTeX, XeLaTeX...) as well as Docbook without any hint of success, I've decided to give up doing a PDF version of this book or it's chapters. I don't see any of these projects mature enough to be capable of formatting a book with a non-English font. They may be great for writing documents in the English language or for praparing academic thesesis, but to compose a bible in a non-English text needed developer level modifications to each of these systems. As doing the layout in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word is unrealizingly diifficult to be automated due to the obfuscated formats of the files, I have absolved myself for doing any more layout of the book.
Open Source
Here is the source code of the most current program I use to convert romantization to cherokee. This isn't the most current version, but it works. cherokee.c
Here is the source code that builds the website, just in case somebody wants to make a similar page. world.c
Here is a modified version of the website code that builds the e-text documents. etext.c
Oh yeah, just to promote a text editor, the entire book was transcribed using VI / VIM
Most recently updated on January 30, 2011.
Online since 9/13/2006
