• Highlights of the Past Year
    2004 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses

    • Help for Translators

      The spiritual food provided by the faithful steward class is now available in at least 390 languages. (Luke 12:42) Translation, therefore, represents a major and constantly growing part of the work of Jehovah’s organization.

      Proper translation is not simply a matter of substituting one local-language equivalent for each word that appears in the original text. Rather, it is a matter of conveying the precise thoughts. Clearly, then, translators need to understand the original text thoroughly before they begin to translate. At times, this can be a challenge.

      Hence, at the direction of the Governing Body, a group of qualified brothers appointed to serve as instructors received training in a program called Course in Improved English Comprehension. After completing the course, which was held at the Watchtower Educational Center at Patterson, New York, the brothers visited translation teams worldwide during the 2002 and 2003 service years. They spent about three months with each team, going through the course and giving practical, on-the-job assistance. Thanks to this program, translators now feel better equipped to grasp the full sense of the English text.

      Said one translation team: “In his kindness, Jehovah saw fit to help us be better qualified to handle our assignment. Now we feel much more confident. With Jehovah’s blessing, we look forward to seeing good results.” A translation overseer stated: “In the past, many of us labored for hours over difficult English expressions and sentences. This slowed down our work. So the Course in Improved English Comprehension has been most welcome. It showed us how to analyze the English text in a systematic way, and it gave us useful strategies for handling difficult text. As a result, we now experience less anxiety and are able to produce a more accurate translation faster.”

      Another team wrote: “This course was more practical than any similar secular education in that it was tailored to our specific needs. We believe that this provision will help translators throughout the world, making it easier for sheeplike ones to ‘get the sense’ of the truth.”​—Matt. 13:23.

      To date, some 1,660 translators working in more than 150 languages have benefited from the course. Additionally, the program has been adapted to help those translating into sign languages and those translating Spanish text into the indigenous tongues of Central and South America.