There is a wealth of Manx Gaelic literature available for access both on paper and on the web. Taggloo launched a Library service last year, with what is possibly the best starting point for any library, The Bible. The Bible is a time capsule, showing us how the language was used when it was the primary language of the island – even before people started to use their own language in a written form themselves.

Using the Library function, it’s a short jump to providing the ability to search and translate the Taggloo corpus. You can enter a word or phrase for translation as you usually would and receive the results. If you’re interested in a deeper translation and understanding of the word or phrase in literature such as The Bible, you can Extend your search by selecting the book(s) you want to search and clicking the Search button.

The translation and search has been deliberately broken into two steps, which was a carefully considered pattern to balance convenience with performance. Searching an entire book (or set of books) can be taxing on the indexes so results from books are held back unless you need them.

Once you’ve performed your search, you can expand the results as you would translations by word or retrieve the entire set of results.

Below each result will be the translation (if available) and the book, allowing you to click to jump to that point in the text.

The Library function can support many texts with differing levels of translation. The next step in the Taggloo story is to provide the tools to allow additional texts to be added into the Taggloo Library, providing even greater insight into the words and translations of Manx Gaelic.