Geraldine Wright, gw_grin@yahoo.com
Translation Coordinator
The year 2005 was an exciting one for Soul Food Ministry, with continued growth in visits to the web site and contributions from new authors. We invite you to share the story of our ministry journey last year.
Soul Food Ministry is very proud that our founding pastor, Rev. Dr. Sandra Bochonok, spent time as a Red Cross volunteer for the first two weeks of October, serving victims of Hurricane Rita in Eastern Texas. In her own words, "I was one of many thousands of volunteers who just wanted to do something, anything, to help, and only wish I could have done more." Well done, Rev. Bochonok!
We received visits from 144 countries spread across the entire globe and every continent, with especially large visits from Brazil and Mexico. The table below shows the number of articles downloaded from the site during the entire year, during January, during December, and during October, which was the best month of the year. Tallies are also broken out by language. We saw a steady growth in traffic over the year, and the most impressive growth was in the Portuguese and Russian language pages, which both grew by about 50%. As you can see, we have also added 3 new languages to the site this year.
Language 2005 Jan Dec Oct (best) Whole site 423,925 31,964 35,970 42,233 English 140,518 13,418 12,834 13,267 Spanish 169,386 11,584 13,557 17,305 French 24,234 1,821 1,976 2,423 Portuguese 82,732 4,747 6,675 8,261 Russian 3,676 255 397 346 Chinese 2,307 139 174 278 German 519 --- 110 136 Afrikaans 245 --- 86 85 Esperanto 308 --- 161 132
One of our happiest accomplishments in 2005 was recruiting a number of non-USA authors. We received Portuguese articles from Rev. Caio Fábio d'Araújo Filho, from the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, as well as Rev. Marcos Gladstone, pastor of the MCC in Rio de Janeiro. A Christmas article in Portuguese was submitted by Ciro d'Araújo, also of the MCC in Rio de Janeiro. Marco Rubio, of the MCC in Monterrey, Mexico, submitted a total of 10 devotions in Spanish, and we now have 1 of them on the site. More will go up in 2006. Finally, Rev. Axel Schwaigert from the MCC in Stuttgart, Germany submitted 2 lovely Labyrinth prayers in German. Incredibly, he had already translated one of them into English, French, Spanish and Afrikaans. We certainly look forward to getting more articles from these authors. Additionally, I have been talking to Rev. Gelson Piber from the MCC in Niteroi, Brazil, about submitting articles. Rev. Piber has already translated a couple of Spanish articles into Portuguese for our site.
Among the goals we set for 2005 was to finish putting the popular Lent 2000 Devotions, co-authored by our founding pastor, Rev. Dr. Bochonok, into Portuguese and French. The Portuguese version was finished early in 2005, well in time for the Lent season. We then began translating the Devotions into French, and most of them are now on-line. The rest will be finished in time for Lent.
We also made a commitment to concentrate on translating material into Spanish. Although we didn't do as many article as we would have liked, we did get a total of 7 new Spanish translations on the site, and have plans for 6-10 more in the coming year.
Another of our 2000 goals was to increase the number of Russian articles on the site. We did post a Russian translation of Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson's article "The Bible...Our Story, Too", and 4 more articles were at the translator as of the end of 2005. They will be posted as soon as we receive them. We also put a link to an on-line Russian Bible on the Russian home page. The Russian pages will be an area of focus in 2006. We are hoping to restyle the current Russian home page to make it look more like the English, Spanish, French and Portuguese pages. This will help us organize the article lists as we add more Russian content to the site.
English content added in 2005 was about evenly split between English translations of the above mentioned articles submitted in other languages and those written by English speaking authors. Rev. Clay Witt, formerly of Holy Redeemer MCC in College Park, MD, USA, continued his Soul Food Week's Journey devotions. He finished Year A of the Standard Lectionary and is now writing devotions on Year B. This series will be finished in November of 2006. Rev. Dr. Sandy Bochonok, the ministry founder, submitted an "International Queer Guide to Prayer" as well as 2 articles on world hunger and a prayer for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
For 2005 we committed ourselves to adding another language to the site to serve existing churches in either Germany or South Africa. While I pondered whether I should start with German or Afrikaans, Rev. Axel Schwaigert made up my mind for me by giving me a labyrinth prayer in German that he had translated into Afrikaans. I took this as a sign that I needed to start pages in both languages. At present, there are very few articles in either language, but we have plans to translate "Homosexuality and the Bible" into both languages in the upcoming year. I am also talking to Rev. Schwaigert about posting one or more of his sermons on our site. I have put links to the German and South African churches on these sites, as well as links to Bibles in German and Afrikaans.
A third language we added this year was Esperanto, a language created in the late 1800's for the specific purpose of providing a very easily learned 2nd language for international communication. It is spoken by people all over the world, and allows conversations to occur between people who do not speak each other's native languages. We chose to add Esperanto because we began to realize that we will never be able to have articles in ALL of the world's THOUSANDS of languages. There are Esperanto speakers in nearly every nation, so they can read our articles and explain to their countrymen that God loves all of us, Gay and Straight, just as we are. The wonderful people of the Ligo de Samseksamaj Geesperantistoj (League of Gay Esperantists) have been a great help in this endeavor. Already they have translated 8 articles for us and are working on more. This endeavor has already alerted some people in Poland, Hungary and Brazil to the existence of MCC, and could possibly lead to the founding of new churches.
The Friend's pages, which we put in place last year to inform readers about our internal operations, are drawing many readers. This year we added an interview with Rev. Dr. Bochonok, the ministry founder, as well as a photo of our participation in the UFMCC General Conference in Calgary, Alberta. Canada. An interview with the translation coordinator is in the works and should be posted early next year. The articles on these pages are turning out to be surprisingly popular.
Over the year we have made efforts to do little modifications to the site that make it a more attractive and colorful, as well as make it easier for the readers to navigate the pages. As we make these modifications we utilize large numbers of small graphics, rather than small numbers of large ones. We are mindful of the danger of burdening the pages with large graphics that load very slowly. If the page takes too long to load, readers may be discouraged and leave before ever reading any of the articles, thus missing the message of Christ's love. At the same time, if, in the interest of rapid loading, we make the pages excessively plain, the visitors may not find them very appealing and leave out of boredom.
We took several steps to publicize the site this year. We rented a vender's table at the UFMCC General Conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in July, where we greeted a great many people and handed out business cards. In addition, we took out an ad in the conference program with versions in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. During the conference we made contact with some potential authors and volunteers. Additionally, we explored advertising in the Advocate, and even went so far as to design an ad, but in the end decided it was too expensive. We would only be able to run it in a few issues, and perhaps not enough people would see it in those few issues to make it worthwhile.
More E-mail came to the site this year than in 2004, nearly all of it in either Spanish or Portuguese. The majority were questions about where in the Bible to find this or that passage, and I referred them to Rev. Dr. Bochonok. We also continued our association with the MCC-DC Internet Prayer Team. I translated the Portuguese prayer requests that came in, and acted as the backup translator for Spanish requests.
One of the 2005 goals that was not accomplished was that we did not replace our Chinese version of "Homosexuality and the Bible". The Canaan Fellowship never sent us the new translation. I have had heard nothing further from them, so I believe their effort has stalled.
We also have not had any success attracting additional funding for the translations. Rev. Bochonok was talking to UFMCC Headquarters about funds for translating selected documents into target languages. But when Hurricane Katrina hit the southeast coast of the United States, attention turned to meeting the more urgent needs of the survivors of that disaster. Our discussions at Headquarters about translation funding have not at this point resumed.
In addition to 2006 plans mentioned above, here are a few more things we want to accomplish:
We look forward to the year 2006 and expect great things from God. Feel free to contact us at sitecomments@soulfoodministry.org if you have any suggestions or if you feel called to help us spread the good news of salvation through Christ over the Internet. Abraços (Hugs).
