Mistakes in Indonesian Bible source text

Since more than 10 years ago, digital versions of Indonesian Bible text has appeared everywhere on the Internet. Some uses .pdb format (as it was used by Palm Bible reader), some plain text, and some has been processed into HTML format. I actually wondered how did that digital format come into existence, since LAI (Lembaga Alkitab Indonesia, Indonesian Bible Society) does not seem to publish them, nor there is a “transcriber” named for copying the whole Bible book into digital format.

I myself am very thankful for the efforts, since without it we won’t have digital Bibles in Indonesian. The problem is strangely, there are many typing errors (or seems to be more of converting errors) that propagates to many sites. For example, (I marked them in [square brackets]):

  • Titus 2:12 Ia mendidik kita supaya kita meninggalkan kefasikan dan keinginan-keingina[n] duniawi…
  • Yeh 11:20 supaya mereka hidup menurut segala ketetapan-Ku dan peraturan-peraturan-K[u]
For now I can’t think of a better way of correcting it besides doing it manually, by using a spell checker (sadly, no spell checker for Indonesian is good enough for this) or — which we are very thankful — based on comments that people send.

Now, more than 10 corrections have been made to the source text. None of them is significant enough as to change the meaning of the text. Most of them are only truncations of the last few letters as the example above. So, don’t worry.

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