The English translation layer

Beside the Gurmukhi, the database carries an English translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa. It is a separate layer: its own table, its own index, its own field in the API, and a visible “EN ·” label on the site. It never replaces, edits or mixes with the Gurmukhi, and a translation is never presented as the original (invariants). 58,039 of the 60,658 lines (95.7%) have one.

The English layer travels beside the scripture, never inside it

Where it comes from

Two sources are registered in the sources table, both the same translator:

source	Rows	Attribution (as stored)	Terms (as stored)
ssk-shabados	57,394	via the ShabadOS open database, release 4.8.7	open data with attribution; the translation author must be credited
ssk-banidb	645	via BaniDB	personal, local, non-commercial use with attribution

The input files are not in any public repository. sggs-data’s scripts/data/fetch_translations.sh downloads them from a private release (translations-en-v1 in sggs-source) and checks every file against the committed pipeline/translations.SHA256SUMS; rebuild_all.sh refuses to start if any file is missing or altered. The ShabadOS file is loaded first; the older BaniDB files (Angs 1–13 and 917–922) are loaded second and replace ShabadOS rows for those lines.

How a translation finds its line

The source files pair a Gurmukhi line with its English. load_translations.py finds the matching line in the corpus on the same Ang or a neighbouring one, comparing a normalised form (NFC, punctuation, digits and the rahao label removed):

match_quality	Rule	Rows
exact	the normalised text is identical	56,195
skeleton	the consonant skeleton (vowel signs removed) matches exactly one line	526
fuzzy	similarity of at least 0.92	1,318

Anything below that is skipped rather than attached to the wrong line, and the first match for a line wins. The Gurmukhi is only read here, never written: the corpus is compared, not changed.

Coverage. 2,619 lines have no English: 2,287 are headings and 332 are verse lines, spread over 142 Angs (Ang 213 has the most, 19). Those lines are returned without an en field.

In the API and on the site

• API. Lines that have a translation carry it as en: in search results (every mode), in /api/ang, /api/shabad, /api/bani (Granth lines only; lines from outside the Granth never get English) and /api/neighbors. There is no per-line source field; /api/meta and /api/health report the total as translations_en. attach_translations in webapp/sggs/core.py adds the field from the translations table and does nothing if the table is absent.
• Website. Every surface renders the English in its own escaped element with lang="en", labelled “EN ·” by the stylesheet, below the Gurmukhi. The footer credits the translator whenever translations_en is above zero. Learn articles show Gurmukhi only, by design.
• iOS. The App Store build uses the public profile, which leaves out translations and fts_en; the app then hides its English toggle, English search and credit line. A build with English (personal profile) is refused by check_release_license.sh unless the licence file says LICENSED: true (the iOS database pair).

Searching the English

fts_en is an FTS5 index over translations.text with the default unicode61 tokenizer: case-insensitive, no stemming, stop words indexed.

• mode=english searches only this index. Each word is quoted and the words are joined with AND, so every word must appear; there is no prefix matching (* is stripped), no phrase search and no stemming (“forgive” and “forgiveness” are different words). Results are ranked by plain BM25.
• mode=auto reaches English only when the query is in Latin script and the earlier tiers (theme names, transliteration, the seeker lexicon, variants) found nothing. It comes before the Roman fold on purpose, so an English word reaches the translation instead of colliding with a folded Gurmukhi word (modes and tiers). Some English words never get here because the seeker lexicon maps them first (for example “mercy” and “love”).
• The response names the tier in mode (english or english-translation). One quirk: when every tier finds nothing, mode can still read english-translation with zero results. Treat mode as a hint, as the modes page says.

The golden contract pins English behaviour: eight mode=english queries (including empty and punctuation-only input) and three auto queries that resolve to the translation.

Licence status

This section records what the repositories say; it is not legal advice, and the decision rests with the owner.

• The sources table stores the terms above. The platform’s NOTICE.md restricts the English to personal, local, non-commercial study and says a written licence from the rights holder is the only route to public or commercial distribution.
• The iOS App Store build therefore ships without English, enforced by the licence gate, and the support page tells users why.
• The public website and API serve the English today. That is an open item in the risk register (“English translation is not licensed for distribution”).

Known issues

• The footer credit names BaniDB (“via BaniDB”), while 57,394 of the 58,039 rows come via ShabadOS; the README names ShabadOS correctly.
• Checksummed but never loaded. sggs-data’s checksum list includes files for Angs 262–296 and an en_repair file that no load step picks up (the load globs match only the other files).
• No per-line provenance in the API. A client cannot tell which source a given en came from.