The Problems of Desktop Indexing of a Book Translated into a Non-Roman Script: Description of a Real Experience

Zarnegar (gold writer) is a word processor widely used by publishers of both scholarly journals and books in Iran. Although it is gradually substituted by Word for Windows that is much more powerful than Zarnegar, the process seems to be slow and most Iranian publishers still prefer to receive manuscripts in Zarnegar than Word. There are many reasons for this preference: Word, though having many great features such as compatibility with other Windows applications and especially with Word Wide Web (WWW) is poor in terms of Farsi, the official language of Iran. The main reason for this poorness is that Farsi versions of Word are in fact Arabic versions. Zarnegar has been developed by Iranians familiar with Farsi script and acts more conveniently than Word in Farsi writing. The fonts employed in Zarnegar are mostly Farsi and seem to be more beautiful than Word due to the tradition of calligraphy among Iranians. Some fonts in Word employ Arabic letters that are not used in Farsi. This feature is of much dislike between Iranians using it. The author, when finished translating an English book into Farsi, confronted some problems when trying to prepare the index to the book. When providing an index to a translated book, the logical criterion to select the entries of the translated index is to base them on the entries of the original language index. Therefore, the entries of the original index were translated, and then rearranged in Farsi alphabet in another file When the task of allocating the page numbers to Farsi entries began by using the “Find” option under the “Edit” menu in Zarnegar, the different equivalents selected in each chapter for a single concept and not found totally by searching under the same term, showed up as the first major problem. The second major problem encountered was the similarity between the concepts used both in a very specific sense as well a general sense. The latter increased irrationally the number of pages containing some entries. Since the book translated was on the theoretical as well as practical aspects of library services, the word “use” was an example of problems caused by the similarity of words that have both specific and general meanings in library and information science context. Some suggestions are provided in the article as to how to start the task of translating the book by first translating the index into Farsi, providing an English-Farsi dictionary as well as a Farsi-English one for frequent reference to them in order to find selected equivalents, how to allocate page numbers while using the Farsi-English dictionary to provide the final Farsi index and how to overcome the problems mentioned above.