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Translating For a Worldwide Audience
May 16, 2011
This month Longyear joins museums around the world in observing International Museum Day. Year-round, through online and media resources, the Museum provides thousands of people around the globe with Longyear-researched histories, biographies and programs that advance the understanding of the life and work of Mary Baker Eddy, and pioneering workers of the Christian Science movement.
Translations play a vital role in reaching a worldwide audience of people who may never set foot in Longyear Museum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, or the Mary Baker Eddy Historic Houses in New England — or even set foot on U. S. soil.
Two documentary films from Longyear Museum Press, “The Onward and Upward Chain” (2004) and “Who Shall Be Called?” (2008), and a 10,000-word biography of Mrs. Eddy on the Museum’s website, are translated into a handful of languages spoken by a significant percentage of the world's Christian population — German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese. Thanks to funding from Museum donors, the film subtitles and the biography translations have made these materials accessible for international audiences, including those in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Japan.
Since the debut of the Museum’s new website in spring 2009, more than 11,870 visitors from around the world have found Longyear’s biography of Mary Baker Eddy there. It covers key aspects of her life and work in a concise format, and many visit the Museum online to read this biography in their native language.
Making translations available to our global audience is a worldwide team effort. Each of our translators is a Christian Scientist and a native speaker of the language. They reside in places as diverse as Boston, Massachusetts; São Paulo, Brazil; Montreal, Canada; Tokyo, Japan; and St. Petersburg, Russia; and we are grateful for their work in advancing the Museum’s mission. The Japanese translation of Mrs. Eddy’s biography benefitted from the experience of Longyear Director•Curator Stephen Howard’s many years in Japan and his fluency with the nuances of that language. As a result, the Longyear website offers the only comprehensive biography of Mrs. Eddy in Japanese. Other websites in several languages offer links to Longyear’s translated biography and send a substantial number of people to the Museum’s website seeking a reliable biography of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. For example, quite a few come from a link on an independent site for Spanish-speaking Christian Scientists. A website in Russian now offers a direct link to Longyear’s Russian translation, one of only two Russian-language biographies of Mrs. Eddy.
Longyear’s Multimedia Producer Web Lithgow remarks, “Longyear is not just waiting for people to come to our door. Electronic media let us bring the subject of the Museum to wherever people may be — and tell Mrs. Eddy’s story in their own mother tongue.”
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