Thursday, June 19, 2008

Back in Odessa ... At last!

We finally made it back to Odessa on February 7th this year. Our furlough took us 8 months longer than I wanted it to. Well part of that was for me to go to school last summer. At any rate we're back!

Some time later I would like to tell you about how we got here. But for now I just want to blog about our experiences as missionaries in Ukraine. You should know I am a missionary who is organizing translation projects for our team. While we were in the States for 20 months I had three projects going. Since nobody was there to do footwork it was tough to keep them going. In January the first project was finally finished and printed. It turns out that the last files which were sent to the printer were not the real last files (either that or the printer made corrections that "uncorrected" it). So we have to do a revision already. In one place the final translation reads "28th century" instead of "20th century". Oh well, I guess we are just ahead of our time.

Projects 2 & 3 are still going. Project 2 is a workbook for discipleship. I thought we were almost done with it and the authors sent me the fourth edition. At first I thought we had to basically retranslate the book, but it turns out that the changes are not as drastic as I first thought. Project 3 is a distance education course. The course was already translated by a team in the city of Zapporozhya at the Bible University there. The translation was not bad, but my team of checkers has been going over it to make sure it is readable and correct as far as grammar is concerned. The fun part for me was editing the graphics that are part of the online course. There were about 100 images to translate into Russian. I used the ZBU graphics which were basically correctly translated, but they looked very primative. The English version has much more professional artwork, so I edited them to Russian. Now all our graphics are ready and they look great!
Here is an example:




Old ZBU image








New from English








Well... enough for now.
Theo