So What Do We Do?

Before we started the mission, we were told that we would be supervising the interpreters for 27 languages in various events, The Church interprets 95 languages. (The United Nations does 10).

Poster from the 50 Year Celebration in 2014

We wondered what events besides General Conference twice a year? Since then we have learned that there are about 300 events that occur during the year including at least twice monthly MTC devotionals; the First Presidency Christmas Devotional; various voice-overs for recordings; regional stake conferences; training for temple presidents and new mission presidents; and the worldwide Law and Religious Liberties Symposium which took place last week – just to name a number of them. Whew!

Sister Dunford training the new Bulgarian coordinator

Our languages are: Albanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Georgian, and Romanian from the former Soviet Union; Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish from northern Europe; Amharic (Ethiopia), Efik, Fante, Igo, Malagasy (Madagascar), Twi and Yoruba from Africa; Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Ilogono, and Tagalog from the Philippines; Haitian, Japanese, Samoan, and Tongan from the rest of the world.

Two sisters - both Natalias - from the Russian team

The Russian brothers

Us with some of Cebuano team

 Many of the countries do interpreting in-country with a back-up team here. A number (especially all of the European ones) are only in country. And some, Haitian, and all the African ones except Fante, are only interpreted here. All together, there are over 300 interpreters on our teams alone. There are ten internet languages, including Japanese and Russian, that are used frequently for various events, especially Japanese. Other than for General Conference, when many are flown in from other parts of the country and the world, the interpreters mainly live in Utah and Idaho.

Elder Dunford viewing the screen that the interpreters use to watch
 the speakers & make sure that they sync.

So when an event comes up, we are sent the details and the languages needed, and then we contact the language coordinators to give them the information.  They, in turn, contact the interpreters to assign them to the event.  There are a lot of cogs making the wheels go. Even though we are very busy, we are loving our mission so much and are grateful to be able to serve the Lord in this way.

The main control room where they can monitor
80-100 interpreters/languages at a time