The Lausanne Movement values the involvement, input and interaction of leaders worldwide. Not only from those who speak English, but also from those who do not. Leading up to Cape Town 2010, and despite a modest budget, much thought was put into finding a way to allow as many leaders as possible to participate in their mother tongue. Countless translators labored to make the Cape Town 2010 Advance Papers, Congress collateral material, Lausanne Global Conversation content more available to speakers of Arabic, French, German, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.
Onsite in Cape Town, 28 professional interpreters were dedicated to simultaneously interpreting plenary and multiplex sessions. During one of the multiplex sessions, I picked up a headset and goose bumps ran down my arm as I heard the high standard of the interpretation. Looking back at the interpreter’s booth, I saw the contagious passion of an interpreter striving to enable his language group to be equal participants. That week, 19 more professional translators from 12 countries worked an estimated 1500 hours in windowless hall 4B to translate the content of five press releases, 26 articles, six daily newspapers, countless resources for participants to take home, website content, participant notices, closing ceremony booklet and more. An additional 39 volunteer translators from 17 countries worked offsite to lighten the work load of the onsite translators from this multilingual Congress.
Still, could we have done more to involve thousands of stellar onsite participants and around the world who do not speak English? I dare to believe so. A great stir arose at the Francophone regional gathering at the Congress because even though content was being made available in French, it was very difficult to respond and create a dialogue. “We have so much to say in response, but have no voice because we don’t speak English!” cried one of the participants.
Truly it is our desire to listen, interact with and give a voice to non-English speakers.
Post Congress, Lausanne renewed its commitment to multilingual and contextualized content. Today, we continue to work with 14 translators to provide fundamental content to Lausanne leaders around the globe. Scores of valuable content is in the queue for translation, waiting for funding to move the projects forward. In addition, and to start to give a voice to the voiceless, the Lausanne Communications Team has begun inviting regions to become more active by submitting articles, blogs, regional events and more in languages other than English.
Practically speaking, communications vehicles used in the regions will no longer have to just mirror their English counterparts but rather be pertinent for and specific to each linguistic group. You should, for example, in the future see a roll-out of language-specific lausanne.org websites tailored to the regions as leaders in those regions are able to dedicate time and effort to take ownership of content creation and updates. Thanks to this significant shift (to regional ownership) we are encouraging relevant and contextualized content. We believe it will allow even more languages to play a central part in the future of The Lausanne Movement. Finally, we long for it convey a strong message of a Movement wanting not simply to communicate to but to learn from the regions. Truly, this is “the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.”
This article was published as part of the Anniversary reflections one year after Cape Town 2010: The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization.