ONE BILLION BIBLES HAVE BEEN CHECKED BY WORD PERFECT CHRISTIAN CORRECTOR

Diana Chandler-Baptist Press / January 5, 2024 At 07: 38, Image: Peachtree Proofreading Service / Baptist Press

Peachtree Publishing Services examines 300,000 details for every Protestant Bible project in the United States.

Jan Gibbs first needed to learn how to draw lines when he began proofreading Bibles for Peachtree Publishing Services fourteen years ago, which celebrated the distribution of a billion copies of his work in December.

Primary, secondary, and tertiary vertical lines denote indentation in every horizontal line of text, especially in books of Biblical poetry. The placement of the lines must be in accordance with the wishes of the translator.

He learned to harmonize poetry and then corrected the running head to suit each publisher's requests. Next footnote and word break.

It was impractical for Gibbs; for him, it was mother's milk.

"My husband says this is really going to drive him crazy," says Gibbs, who currently serves as Peachtree's vice president of Bible proofreading. I find it very interesting."

There is no room for error when correcting God's true word.

Peachtree president Chris Hudson told Baptist Press that the company corrects 80% of English Protestant Bibles in the United States, corrects many Catholic Bibles, and serves publishers worldwide.

"We want people to find God when they read the Bible, not find fault," he said.

However, with so much attention to detail, it was obvious that someone had made a mistake at some point in Peachtree's history.

Hudson said, "We don't get a lot of feedback from mistakes. Most of the time, we catch a lot of errors before printing. Each step along the way is seen at least twice by different people." We found a lot of things through electronic checks and our people. But since we are humans, it is sometimes criticized for misspelling some words. However, it is rare.

Peachtree's primary theological motivation was to display the true Word of God in perfect text.

We had the Bible he wanted, so we wanted to preserve it the way God wanted. Hudson stated, "That's why our people work for us. We could all make more money doing something else, but we are driven to protect and advance God's word and help people study the Bible." A purely theological impulse is what motivates us.

The heart of evangelism—spreading the word of God at home and around the world—inspired Peachtree's team of "introverts" to sit at their desks and spend hours checking texts. By 2023, Peachtree will proofread Bibles in twelve languages and be able to ship them to 94 countries.

In addition to Catholic Bible Publishers, Peachtree has more than 45 clients, including B & H Publishing,

Harvest Ministries, Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, the Bible Museum, the American Bible Society, and Moody Publishing. Gibbs thinks about the mistakes made on the project he oversaw. Part of the red-letter text was missing because one of the scanners on his team missed details. When printing, the publisher found an error. Some pages must be drawn, and the correct pages must be inserted. That's very expensive.

"I was just devastated. It was like at the end of the Red Letter section," Gibbs said. This is similar to a missed-end punctuation mark. That's what it looks like. When you see red letters, there is one red quote that ends one passage, and the two quotes next to it should be black. But it was really terrible."

Before the publisher completed the print, Peachtree had to double-check the entire red lettering section.

"Needless to say, since then, I have almost always checked the Red Letter section for jobs for which I am responsible," he says. We are human beings, and sometimes we miss things, which is devastating when we do because it is a very important book.

Bible text, supplemental materials, study materials, devotionals, concordances, and a cross-reference system are all details Peachtree examines about each Bible distributed prior to publication. About twenty full-time workers and additional contract employees are involved in the work, which has been carried out remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic. Each project takes hundreds of hours, usually lasting up to three months, Hudson says.

According to the Peachtree website, Peachtree has its roots in the work of solo proofreaders Mildred and Frederick Tripp from the '60s. Mildred developed a unique proofreading method at Oxford University Press, which earned her a clientele. After getting the idea from Tripps, Doug and June Gunden founded Peachtree Editorial Services in 1981. They refined the method to include a systematic team approach to proofreading.

Hudson describes software as the best merging of both worlds, which he uses to work with human hands. He claimed that this is not artificial intelligence, but he suggested that in the future, artificial intelligence might enhance the software.

The proofreading process has changed since Gibbs started at Peachtree, but he's still as motivated as ever.

"I've spent the last 13 years studying it, and I still love it," he told the Baptist Press.

News Sorces : https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2024/january/peachtree-publishing-christian-bible-proofreading-billion.html