It’s time to celebrate! Our nonprofit translation team, The King’s Translators, just celebrated its 10th anniversary with the publication of our 100th book. I am so proud of this team and the dozens of translators, revisers, sponsors, and support staff who have helped us achieve this goal.
How did we publish 100 books in 10 years? Today, I will briefly share a few things that made it possible, because I believe this can be replicated in other languages.
- We work as a team. When we first moved to Quebec in 2009, I realized how few French written resources were available for our religious denomination. I enrolled in a university translation program, but my own efforts were no match for the huge task facing us. I was inspired to gather a team of volunteers who were willing to use their language gifts for the “King of kings”. We have since added some remunerated staff, but our volunteers are still an integral part of the team.
- We combine our skills to produce quality translations. Every translator has a handicap, because they have one language that is stronger than the other. So we incorporate both English and French team members, who use their strengths to complement each other’s work.
- We follow a rigorous revision process. While we have simpler processes for electronic materials, our published books include: translation; bilingual revision (comparing the translation to the original text, for Fidelity); stylistic revision by a French native speaker (for Readability); and proofreading (for Conformity). These are the three quality elements of translation that we have discussed in previous blogs.
- We break down goals into manageable pieces. I’ll be honest, 4 years ago when I first blurted out that we were going to publish 100 books by our 10th anniversary, it was an exciting moment. But not long afterward, I had to sit down and figure out what it would take to achieve that goal. This involved project management spreadsheets, follow-up to keep things moving along, fundraising, and a personal commitment to work on the project several hours each week for the next few years.
- We celebrate together! At a recent conference here in Quebec, we had the opportunity to celebrate our achievement and thank everyone who had been involved over the years. I can hardly describe the feeling I had seeing all 100 books displayed, and reminiscing about how we started almost from nothing a decade ago. I’m so proud of this team!
I hope you have enjoyed celebrating with us today, and I encourage you to set an audacious goal for the language that you are passionate about.
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
