I just got back from the Exponential Conference in Orlando where thousands of church planters gathered to learn about the latest trends and ideas in church planting. It’s been the third year in a row I attend, and this year I got the chance to organize a crew of Spanish translators for a bunch of sessions. I was afraid I would not benefit much from the conference because of all the work that it entailed for me, but I came out with a bunch of takeaways and impressions that I’d like to share via this blog later on. For now, here are the main things I experienced throughout the week:
- Serving alongside so many hard working volunteers was humbling. Some of them even traveled long distances just to support our crew (everyone in it did a fantastic job!).
- Gathering a mix of ideas was inspiring. Because of my duties with the translation crew I had to go from room to room making sure things were ok or helping solve issues. By the end of the conference I had heard a bunch of ideas that were wrapped up nicely and probably unknowingly by Francis Chan.
- Hanging out with my friends throughout and after the conference was great, although not easy. I was running around a lot, but I did get to talk and share with some of them and that filled my soul so much.
I will share in following posts some of the notes I took during different sessions. Stay tuned.
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April 28, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Zachary
Hey…. did you translate for Craig Groeschel? Do you do a lot of translation work? At work we’re talking about offering all our content in multiple formats, and man it’s a big task! It’s nuts when you start breaking out all that needs to be touch/ tweaked to port it over to another language.
Our first attempt was our site last year http://www.oneprayer.com and we didn’t do too well… at one point we had a headline that was talking about ‘kids material’ and in Spanish it was talking about goats! Not good!
Hope all is well… great to see photos of you and your family.
Stay in touch.
April 28, 2009 at 3:59 pm
galexdiaz
That’s hilarious! I believe you though, translations can be tricky!
I actually did not translate for Craig Groeschel myself, I was in charge of assigning translators to speakers and I translated for other guys as well, so I assigned Craig G. to someone else so I could hear him
. Our lead pastor, Matt Mehaffey, got a chance to pick Craig G. up from the airport and chat with him for a bit, and just today he was mentioning how encouraging that conversation was!
I have done translations at other conferences in Venezuela, and here in the US I’ve translated simultaneously at different churches whenever it was needed. At my current church I coordinate a group of translators as well. As far as written translation, I’ve done different things for our church and for the Exponential Conference, for which I translated most of its website (http://espanol.exponentialconference.org/). Because it takes a lot of work and it is very time consuming I usually do it for a fee. What I do is I translate by paragraphs and phrases and pair them with their English equivalent in an Excel or Numbers document so it’s easy for the website maintenance person to plug them in.
Are you looking for that kind of work? Does your church have a Hispanic ministry or something of the like?
What you guys are doing is awesome, keep blessing the Kingdom!