[Linux4christians] Translation of Church Resources

[Weiers Coetser]

Hi

My name is Weiers Coetser and I have been lurking on this list for quite 
some time now. I live in South Africa. I am a trained pastor, but I am 
currently working as a dormitory dean in a church college in Cape Town. 
I am passionate about open source, allthough I am not technically very 
savvy. I run Ubuntu Linux almost exclusively on my computer (dual boot 
to Windows once in a while)... I use my computer mostly for word 
processing and maintaining data of students in the dormitory etc.

OK....

I thought I would like to share a situation with you and ask for your 
comments. Everybody probably knows that the church in South Africa is 
facing many challenges in a post-apartheid era. My denomination has been 
battling around issues of church unity since the 1990's already and we 
have still not managed to integrate white and black church structures. 
Another attempt to do this (integration) failed very sadly here in Cape 
Town this last week-end. This is a cause of great distress to me. As one 
can expect there are a lot of politics and emotional rhetoric involved 
in this process. One of the issues that cause the last attempt to fail 
is the perception amongst Afrikaans (white) church members that they 
will no longer have guaranteed access to resources in their own language 
when the predominantly black population take over leadership. They 
already complain that since the 1990's very few English resources have 
been translated and published in Afrikaans.

This is probably true. Tranditionally the church has followed the old 
way of providing resources: The church appoints a translator who spends 
months translating a document and then send it to publishers to publish 
at great expense. I've suddenly wondered if we could not try something 
else that would empower the church members to become involved in their 
own language needs.

If we followed an open source model where we publish lesson studies on a 
WIKI- kind of page and then allow any number of individuals to then 
translate a paragraph or a sentence at a time online. ... in the same 
way that the open source community translate their apps and software 
into regional languages.

Here is my question, as I don't know enough, but would like to research 
the possibilities:  Are there systems available that a person could 
easily adjust for such purposes? Do they require great technological 
savvy to set up, or could a person quickly master the skills to do 
this?  Are there any particular models that I could study to see if this 
has worked in the past?

I hope I've described my situation well and asked the questions clearly. 
I would appreciate any wisdom. Our church is really suffering because we 
have not been able to build trust and goodwill amongst members. Perhaps 
finding a better way to empower members to develop resources in their 
own languages could help us cross one more hurdle towards unity.

God Bless
Weiers