Translating Apostle's Creed to all languages

I am not sure how much we can done with Vision 2025. However, I think translating Apostle's Creed can be more feasible strategy to provide the main frame of Christian faith in vernacular languages. The small size of text with limited semantic domain, may make the creed a good candidate for different degree of machine aid translation.

Once the ethnic-lingual communities have this frame work, they can start with contextualize/indigenous theology along with further exploring the whole Bible and advocating further direction for vernacular scriptural translation.

I am also proposing the develop semantic representation of apostle's creed(started from Chinese base and/or English base) for machine generation, e.g. TBTA. Anyone would like to help with Latin base semantic representation are certainly welcome.

How do you think? Anyone interested to suggested language projects or facilitate/assist for it?

Translation Psalm is difficult. How can volunteer help?

I share in FB about Psalm in the conversation between bono and Eugene Peterson.
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/slices/watch-bono-and-eugene-peterson-talk-about-psalms


Good Bible Translation have the quality of accuracy, clarity, naturalness, consistent and acceptability. At one time one colleague mentioned about the significant of literary. Some projects started and end with New Testament, and portion of the Old Testament. Poetry is certainly very challenging. Translating old testament literary require master both the source language Hebrew and the target language very well, plus. The artistic impact of the translation may be missed, as the translation team have so many different details and aspects need to attend to. If possible, I think relevance can be another feature with high priority for poetry/psalm translation.

If Bible translation required all different skills and need to pay attention to all these aspect. Can volunteer do it? Bible Translation seldom done by one individual without collaboration. Bible translation need team work. I am still thinking how can we collaborate and contribute Bible translation as a master piece of arts.

Some one may not able to translate it well, but with the sense of music and godliness, I think we together can make the difference. Bono is not a translator. His insight may help.

How GOSP4EL Create Value?

Currently I have been thinking about the role of NGO and self-sustainability. I think NGO and enterprise has to create value through their service and product in order to bring the impact to the community and society. However, NGO or enterprise generate revenue and profit only for its self-sustainability without considering the social responsibility and relevance but exploit global human resources can be an issue -- anti-social.

That apply to individual as well. Human life with one's time is limited resources. How can we make good use of our time in order to create eternal value can be an important question about personal mission for every Christian or people who believed in life after death. With the great commission and great commandment with Christian value, Glorifying God by loving other, showing His goodness and sharing Biblical teaching through testimony of Words and deeds are all important.
As Christian NGO, I think that is also important to fulfill these missions and help our fellow Christians to serve other by create value towards these goals.
I hope that churches, different NGO and enterprise concern more about their social responsibility, relevance along with their accountability and effectiveness.

As a worker in an NGO/mission, I am thinking how can GOSP4EL to help.
I am thinking direct engaging laity as volunteer adopting direct sale model to reduce the cross of the NGO/mission. One of my concerns people with political ambition may try to rebuild the tower of Babel not for God's favor. Thus, I wonder whether a flatter structure（see mw work about value and pattern of Bible translation of post-colonial context) without much offer head charge and allow more collaboration and synergy to be good steward for God's mission.

Thus, we need to ask a couple questions:

1. How can volunteers be self-sustainable as a community of learning and practices?

2. How can a volunteer community create value?

3. How can we share resources to create value?

4. What values or impact we would like to see?

Myth of Engaging Volunteers

After trying to engage Chinese volunteers, I think I have the following observation and lesson learned:

Observation:

There are many gifted people available to be engaged for meaningful course

There are many needs that gifted people can help.

There are need to link them together but how?

Some volunteers are so specialized and not ready to change?

Self-learning, self-motivated and hacker mentality is important.

Diversity of ethos, languages, ideologies of volunteers make collaboration difficult.

Myth and Lesson learned:

1. Engaging volunteers is easy

Describe the task for employee is not that easy, I fear that it is even more difficult for volunteers without knowing much about their background.

Ability of matching the task with the gift of the volunteers is great gift.

Collaboration and need of coordination with all diversity making it even harder.


2. Chinese diaspora speak Chinese

I found many Chinese diaspora are very multilingual and have very high proficiency in English. I also find myself communicate in writing in English is much more easier than in Chinese, even though my English is broken, especially in the academic and professional domains.


3. Volunteers is free

I'm still pondering what Einstein say and Linus Torvads said.


"If there is no price to be paid, it is also not of value." Einstein


"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free." Linux Torvads.


Volunteer is not free. Serious volunteers commit and sacrifice their time, which is very valuable. Open source and other free stuff are free for the users to use, but other pay the cost of the labor without or with relatively low compensation to share their skills and time to provide the privileges that other can enjoy.
As NGO, I think we/they should be carefully accountable to their contribution. I don't know what kind of auditing system can audit volunteers resources. I think it is worth to explore. I think NGO should also allow volunteers to have more ownership and privilege of communication and decision making to the clients and also to the NGO.

Where to go from now?

1. Not to engage volunteer but to inspire what dreams they can own and achieve their dreams.

2. Knowing well the need and the way of self-sustainability or else engaging highly motivated financially independent volunteers.

3. Start from small. Small group and small task.

4. Make good use of social network.

Multi-lingual Collaborative Translation Platform developed in Japan and China

“大家翻译”志愿翻譯者合作平臺。小弟最近在一協作翻譯研究學術會議中遇到負責“大家翻译”的 Kageura 教授。他們翻譯培訓的公共平臺正在創建中。如果能夠是開源碼和開源數據就更好。

“大家翻译”是由情报通信研究机构语言翻译组和东京大学图书馆情报学研究室共同研究开发的项目，三省堂和国立情报学研究所连想情报学研究开发中心对开发项目予以了大力协助。

Tokyo University contribute a collaborative translation platform to bridge the language gap of the world. The platform's interface is multi-lingual.

http://cn.trans-aid.jp/index.php/article_list/recent

中國的譯言網

http://www.yeeyan.org/

In China, there is one web-site for collaborative translators(volunteer or paid), shall we consider to translate and share something meaningful to cross the language barrier and reach those need good message and good reading materials？

中國也有协助翻译的平台--译言网（收费的和志愿者都有），希望有更多、更好的翻译作品将好消息和好的读物广泛流传。

Is there any website like this in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau or oversea Chinese?

这样的网站，请问港澳台、海外华人也有吗？

What I learned from backup and restore: stop procrastinate, think more, write more, share more esp. on the blog

Many years ago, I met a Bible translation consultant and we talked about backing up the translation project data. He unbuttoned the shirt and pulled the CD out under his shirt ... He told me that is the way that he handled the backup. In addition he also send a copy of the data to somewhere else in his home country.

I was very careful handling Bible translation data when I was a project manager and advisers. Relatively I became less careful as I was no longer responsible for a specific project.

Recently I came across a number of issues and headache about backup and restore. The operating system being updated, the format of backup data may not be readable by the new system ... Most of documents can be recovered but not some of my work in my computer in last few weeks, Thank you for the cloud backup, most of my email communication are still there in the cyper space ...

Thus, the lesson I learned is not to procrastinate and try to write more on line and backup online. Thus after months of my last blog. I think I should think aloud in written form. Many of my ideas can be immature and not yet ready to publish. Life is a risk. Thinking is a risk. Sharing what you think could be even more risky.

One of my concern is that I see the need of Global Chinese but I was limited by my language proficiency, I speak fluent Cantonese, but I am not able to process Chinese as fast as English, even though my English is broken and can not be well understood by English native speaker. Most of the academic and profession vocabulary used by me are in English, as I was taught in secondary school using English textbook and vocab, but the class was explained in Chinese ...

Anyway, I admire people like Augustine, who wrote more than I read. I am pondering recently more on academic publishing -- how good is good enough, shall I focus or balance between quantity of ideas or quality of the writing in a ever changing world. Obsolete can be a scaring word but is the reality.

Thus, you may see me to share more often in the coming few weeks.