As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I had the opportunity to lead a group of translators for the Exponential Conference. One of the things I heard from people during and after the conference is that they did not notice the translators most of the time, which is great news! All of them did a fine job! However, there were things that happened behind closed doors that were really funny to me. So, here are some of them…

- One of our translators was translating for a certain speaker whose accent is difficult to understand. So much so that this translator could not understand much of what the speaker was saying… until the speaker decided to talk about a stripper who came to know Christ. The translator was only able to translate the story about this speaker’s friend’s trip to the strip club… and could not understand the resolution of the story! So he only translated the first part of the story!

- There were three translators in one room, two of them listening to what the one person was translating. At some point, this person translated the phrase “Acts 29,” as in Acts 29 Network. The other two translators, having gone to seminary and worked in ministry for years, were appalled by this and convinced the person translating to translate it as Acts 2:9 since Acts 29 is not a real chapter of that book. So, if someone calls Acts 29 network asking for the Acts 2:9 network, that’s our fault!

- One of our translators was enjoying a certain speaker’s jokes so much he began to laugh out loud during the translation and forgot to translate the jokes! We told him later he should have said “I guess you should have been there…”

… I guess ya had to be there…