For U students who speak a second language, translating is a way to keep language skills sharp.
Some of these students who speak another language or learned languages on missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have found a way to use their linguistic talents as volunteer translators for the LDS Church’s general conference.
The LDS Church is holding its 178th Semiannual General Conference on Saturday and Sunday.
In addition to the 21,000 people filling the Conference Center, the conference will be broadcast to more than 6,000 church buildings in 96 countries throughout the world.
Millions will view the conference through satellite transmissions and the Internet.
Domoina Voniarisoa, a U alumnus from Madagascar, moved to Utah in 2002 to attend college. She has been a volunteer translator for general conference for six years.
When Voniarisoa moved to Utah, she was asked by the language coordinator of the LDS Church to help translate conference into Malagasy, one of the 93 translated languages for the conference.
“There weren’t that many of us in Utah,” she said.
In 2003, when she first started volunteering as a translator, she would receive the talks the speakers in conference had written. She would read and translate them into Malagasy.
The process has evolved since that time. The talks are sent to a translation team in Madagascar to be translated and Voniarisoa gets the translated talk as well as the English version to check.
Voniarisoa said translators usually have about a month to work on conference speeches. She said that sometimes they have 10 minutes to make last-minute revisions.
“This is when your heart really starts pounding,” she said.
Sometimes translators are caught off guard when speakers go off on tangents.
“Sometimes they skip paragraphs or go into stories we don’t know how to translate,” Voniarisoa said. But, she said, translators enjoy it and even get a laugh out of hastily translated phrases when they go back and listen to the recordings.
“It is a good service for my people that they can hear it in their own language,” she said. “This is the least I can do to serve my people in Madagascar.”
Josh Spere, a Salt Lake Community College sophomore in accounting, is also on the Malagasy translation team. He served as a Mormon missionary in Madagascar.
“It’s a good way to make sure I don’t forget Malagasy,” Spere said.
Translating is a challenge for both Spere and Voniarisoa sometimes. Voniarisoa has the benefit of being a native Malagasy speaker, but she has to be ready for occasional complex English words and phrases.
Spere has to study the language books he brought home with him so he can translate the words, as well as the nuances of the message the speaker is trying to convey.
“So much of what is said is not in the words8212;it’s in the intonation,” said Spere.
As LDS Church membership expands worldwide, so does the number of languages that need translation. In 1995, general conference was translated into 33 languages. This year, the number will reach 93 with the addition of Tzutujil, a language spoken by a group of American Indians.
Malay is another addition to the number of languages into which conference is translated. Until recently, LDS Church members in Malaysia had been listening to conference in Indonesian, said Nathan Andrews, a junior in mechanical engineering at the U who is also on the Malay translation team.
MP3 audio files, as well as transcripts from general conference, will be available in more than 80 languages within a few weeks.