Translating RESPECT
A useful consequence of RESPECT's online awareness raising is the 'snowball effect' as new volunteers introduce their skills, contacts and organisations, who introduce theirs, and so on and so forth.
Perhaps the most striking example of this is when one of these volunteers is able to use their language skills to translate RESPECT's message for a whole new - and possibly previously unreachable - audience.
Australian Lisa Zilberpriver is one such person, and has been working with Will Wallace to translate the RESPECT website into Hebrew. Currently based in Israel, Lisa says she learned of RESPECT through the United Nations (UN) Volunteering site and believed she could put her experience of translating for the diving club she works for to good use here.
'Translating from any language is always challenging,' Lisa says, 'but translating into Hebrew is always a little more complicated than to other Latin-based languages like Spanish.'
She explains that in Hebrew the roots are very different, meaning for example that an anagram such as RESPECT (which stands for Refugee Education Sponsorship Program, Enhancing Communities Together) in English - and which translates well into Spanish - completely falls apart in Hebrew.
One particular problem was in translating the word enhancing, whose closest Hebrew equivalents were 'advancing,' 'broadening,' or 'enriching.' After discussions with Will and Marc Schaeffer, Lisa finally settled on 'enriching.' She also points out that Hebrew phrases tend to take up less space than their English equivalents as they almost completely avoid the use of vowels.
'There are several characters that represent vowels,' she says. 'The same character represents a few different vowel sounds, depending on the position of little dots and lines next to it. However the dots are almost never included and Israelis tend to read just by word recognition and context - like if you saw "th sea is fll of wtr", you'd know what I meant by that.'
An additional issue which both Lisa and Will have commented on is that of software. As webmaster, Will Wallace is responsible for bringing the translations to the internet, but he says that encoding Hebrew can be very difficult, a problem which Lisa sympathises with following her own difficulties with Hebrew software.
Ultimately, the high level of English language literacy of most Israelis makes the translation efforts with Hebrew easier. But this will not necessarily be the case for many of the audiences RESPECT is trying to reach. And for this reason as much as any other, the snowball effect is more than welcome as it picks up more and more people with translating skills along the way.