No shortage of work for the Latter Day Saints
We all tend to think that we are stretched sometimes, particularly when a large translation project lands in our laps, but maybe we should just be grateful that we are not one of the staff or lay translators employed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly known to many as The Mormons).
In some 31 offices spanning 24 time zones worldwide the diligent translators constantly battle against a workload of up to 2,000 ongoing translation projects; projects which include translations of annual lesson resources for church members, magazines, handbooks, computer software and much much more…and all to be rendered into as many as 64 different languages.
Of course all being Church members the translators see their work as a spiritual, if somewhat time consuming process, but it is truly amazing as to what lengths translators in some of the more far flung locations will go to in order to accomplish their tasks.
A lay translator in Albania, for instance was tasked with the translation of church literature into her native Albanian; she was, no doubt, eager to carry out the task as one of the few members of the newly recognised church in that country, however, this was only possible for around 30 minutes very early in the mornings before the inevitable power outages thwarted her PC based task.
An Indian tribesman in remote Paraguay had an even more difficult task to spread the word…he managed to learn Spanish during a period of seconded missionary service and was then returned to his native locale with some high tech equipment in tow in order to translate a Spanish satellite language feed into his native Nivaclé dialect.
I guess that the next time I’m tempted to whinge; I’ll get a grip, get a brew and thank my lucky stars I’m not in Paraguay…or Albania!