COLUMNS AND FIELDS (5)

4.5 TRANSLATION FIELDS

Fig. 4.51 The ‘Date’ and translation fields

DATE (fandango [purple])

The date field records the date of the record, or at lease the date it might have been published in a list.

Fig. 4.52 The ‘Translation’ columns

ENGLISH (light grey)

The English field is the second of the two ‘original record’ fields, ‘Australian’ being the first. This is where the original translation is given. Some of the earliest entries in the databases for this field were loose versions, but later it was attempted to be precisely faithful to the original recording.

ENGLISH JS MAIN (yellow)

The English JSM field is a simplified and standardised version of the ‘English’ field. Here, for example, the following might be standardised to ‘little’: little, narrow, short, sixpence, small.

PLACE OF (grey, yellow print)

As many of the records are place names, including the description ‘place of ...’, the ‘place of’ field was introduced, where the word ‘place’ is entered where appropriate.

ENGLISH JS DFX tense (gold, red print)

Fig. 4.53 An example of mostly nouns,with the function at left, and detail in the red print column

The ‘Eng JS DFX tense’ field is used to record standard amplifications of the basic meaning of a word, such as, for verbs, ‘did’ (past), ‘will’ (future), -ing (continuous); and, for nouns, ‘in’ or ‘at’, for locative case, ‘of’ for possessive, ‘to’ for allative (motion towards), ‘from’ for elative (motion away), ‘for’ for purposive, ‘by’ for causal and the like. Originally these elements were included in the English JSM field, but they reduced the potential for matches and so this new field was introduced.

ENGLISH JS ADJ (pale yellow)

Fig. 4.54 The last column is ‘Eng JS adj’, showing its adjectival function

The ‘English JS Adj’ field began as a simple adjectival field, for use for such entries as ‘white cockatoo’, ‘blue gum’, ‘black duck’, ‘gigantic lily’. These would be rendered as shown below:

English JS main	English JS adj
cockatoo	white
gum	blue
duck	black
lily	gigantic

Later this field came to be used for subordinate information generally, not strictly or simply adjectival.

COMMENT (cream)

Fig. 4.55 Part pf the comment field can be seen on the far right

The ‘comment’ field occurs in two places on the OVERVIEW layout, to the right of the  English JS adj field being one of them. In this position it is where still more subordinate information for an entry might be placed.

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OFF SCREEN TO THE RIGHT

On a 17-inch screen at 150%, the ‘Comments’ field is the last one visible, although there are other fields further to the right. Those fields are not part of the standard display and are there for reference purposes, and are changed from time to time to suit any new purpose.