In 2011, I launched The King’s Translators to translate religious materials into French. Almost a decade later, this amazing team has translated over 5 million words and published over 70 French books on Amazon.
You can replicate what we’ve done for your own nonprofit. I’m going to show you a simple 3-step path to creating a translation team – the one I wish we had known about at the beginning. It will work in any language!
The first step in launching your team is to choose some short documents that you want to translate in the next few months, for a total of about 150 pages. Then you will choose your team members.
If you are willing to act as the team coordinator, you only need 4 other people to get started. Remember they do not have to be local; translation work can be done from any corner of the world and sent by email. You will ask for a commitment of 3 hours per week.
You need 2 translators – their work takes the most time; for now, they should be bilingual, but native speakers of the language you are translating into, and have great writing skills. Don’t automatically choose an interpreter – written translation is a different skill set that they may or may not have.
You also need 1 bilingual reviser – to compare the translation to the original – for the sake of quality, this should be a native speaker of the language you are translating from, who is also fluent in the target language.
Finally, you need 1 formatter/proofreader – for now these roles are combined because they take less time than the other roles. It should be someone with computer/design skills. Also, it should be a native speaker of the target language, so they can clean up any awkward phrasing. You know, like those spam emails you get that start with “Beloved” or “Dearest”?
In the next few weeks, we will explore the criteria for your translation team members, in more depth. Stay tuned! And check out the details in “The 3-Hour Translation Team”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/2924148561
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
