Dear Translating Angels,
Now you are 24 translators blessing Heavenletters!
A great big thank-you to all the translators who have been here with us for a long time or short time, giving your all to Heavenletters. We are happy to have 10 new translators (and more to come!) who are bringing so much energy, enthusiasm, and inspiration to all of us.
Special great gratitude to the leaders and liasons for all languages:
Chinese: Leon Wilsjin
Dutch: Luus Van Leeuwen
French: Philippe Lombard
German: Theophil Balz
Indonesian: Felicia Levina
Italian Paula Launonen
Portuguese: Diana Alexandrino
Russian: Victoria Dordzhieva
Spanish: Adele Hirose and Wanda Veloz
Remarkable translators bless us here. It has to be that God brought you. You amaze and humble the rest of us who also desire to serve Heavenletters. How can we help you? Please keep the channels of communication open on the forum. Please respond to this Translator News Digest on the forum, if you please.
You are invited to check in to the Global Translator Circle every day so you can keep up with what’s going on. There is such a multitude of new posts with so much news that it’s hard to make your way through it all at once.
Thus, this Translator News Digest!
This issue:
1. What’s happening with the Heavenletter Website Upgrade?
2. Are there more Spanish subscribers than any other language besides English?
3. What are the general translation priorities?
4. The 10 Most Used Languages on Internet
5. Administration Changeovers
6. Help Wanted!
Website Upgrade
Santhan and William, the 2 Drupal programmers, are focusing on the upgrade.
Here are some of Santhan’s and Will’s ideas. Santhan’s words are in italics, and Will responds. Can’t you just feel their enthusiasm about brightening Heavenletters’ web site?
- improving the way for translators to collaborate:
I'd like to build a page that has a big grid that lists all the Heavenletters vertically and the languages horizontally. It should make things easy to see which ones have and haven't been translated yet. Perhaps I can also make a way for translators to flag a specific Heavenletter to let the other translators know they're going to translate it. I was also talking to Gloria about having all the translators subscribed to the translator's forums by default.
- multi-lingual content (based on sub domains for each language) and translations of core static content:
I hadn't considered using sub domains. I just checked, and it's surprisingly simple since Drupal already supports it. Turn on the feature in Drupal, set up subdomains through the DNS settings, and then set Apache to use the sub domains as site aliases. I should mention the translation systems are where I have the least amount of experience, though I'm learning quickly how they work.
- OEM pro automation via the API:
I've only briefly looked into this, but it says the API can do almost everything you can do through the regular interface. Would be nice to have all the mailing list stuff manageable through heavenletters.org.
- improved donation workflow:
Perhaps have an overlay that pops up with all the donation options? Might be good to have options other than PayPal.
- better content management and wysiwyg [what you see is what you get]for admin:
I've got CKEditor installed at the moment, I should be able to tweak that for just about everything we could need in a wysiwyg. For content management I could create some custom views based around what people need.
- rebuilding the theme and including a mobile friendly responsive design:
The D7 site is currently using a Zen subtheme, which is fairly mobile friendly by default. Of course it's not much to look at yet, and there are plenty of other options. I have a bit of experience turning older sites into mobile friendly versions, so that should be fairly easy to do.
***
Thanks a bunch, Santhan and Will. Love your ideas!
Translator Questions
Q: Is it true that there are more Spanish subscribers than any other language?
A: Yes, it's true! A rough count is 877 subscribers.
You will see further down why it is not surprising that there are more Spanish subscribers than in any other language.
Q: What do you most need us translators for?
A: 1. Daily Heavenletters first. I believe God set up this way -- a new published Heavenletter a day.
2. The E-book. It is new, powerful, and we anticipate that it will reach many new people who have not yet discovered Heavenletters. We want everyone to know Heavenletters exist. Let's reach the people who would love to read Heavenletters if only they knew they existed. Let’s make the name Heavenletters heard all over the world.
3. Earlier untranslated Heavenletters.
Several translators are eager to catch up with E-Book and several translators are eager to translate the older untranslated unpublished Heavenletters. The Heart of the translator is all important and important to all of us.
You know there are translator teams by language, and there is an overall team that includes all of the translators and administrators all together. God tells us that we are One. Let’s make it so.
God bless you, beloved translators.
The 10 Most Used Languages on Internet
According to Google, the top 3 are:
1. English
2. Chinese
3. Spanish
We are fortunate to have Heavenletters sent out in all the above languages.
Here are the rest of the most popular internet languages in the order Google assigns them:
4. Japanese
5. Portuguese
6. German
7. Arabic
8. French
9. Russian
10. Korean
Numbers are nice, yet we are reaching hearts and souls. We are overjoyed to reach Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, and Portuguese Heavenreaders and their hearts and soul.
We are overjoyed and proud to have so many great translators. Soon we will reach out to all the countries with languages that we don’t have translators for. Until we have translators for these languages, the people of these countries can only subscribe in English.
Just as so many bright translators came here from our requests, Santhan and William will add a request to English Heavenletters as we seek translators of all languages possible. Coming soon!
There are more than 6700 languages spoken in over 228 countries! We have a lot of translators to welcome!
Changes in Responsibilities:
Theophil continues to translate into German 7 days a week.
Now, Luus, a Dutch translator and Administrator, will take over the administrative responsibilities that Theophil has done perfectly for the past 6 or more years. Luus will now take care of new Heavenletter drafts as they are written, numbering and then adding the proofed and titled Heavenletters to the Heavenletter listings. Theophil is devoting his new free time to art.
Engin Vural, our sole Turkish translator, is taking a leave to work on a novel she is writing. We wish her success with her novel and would love to have her come back soon!
Help Wanted!
Are you creative? Do you like to write? Would you like to take over this Translator News Digest and make it wonderful? And, of course, add photos and your creative ideas? Make it prize-winning? All suggestions welcomed. Perhaps two people would like to work on this. Are you the ones we are looking for? Let us know who you are.
With love and blessings,
Gloria and the Spectacular Heaven Team