Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Billy "no mates"

What's the deal? Its not like I don't have friends - I do. But I get to the weekend after a busy working week, and I'm sat here wondering what to do with my weekend. Nothing was planned, and while that can be nice, right now its the last thing I needed.

I got home friday night and started to work on a web project which I put on the back burner a long time ago, even though its been on my heart to do this since about 2006. In Estonia there's an inherent problem with worship songs and their translations. Typically, the same song can be translated many times by different people. The end result is different churches singing different versions, and people wasting lots of time re-inventing the wheel. Its silly, and it only happens because of poor inter-church communication and a lack of any centralised system or resource.

So I am building a website which mission is:
  • To provide a great resource for praise and worship song translations.
  • To provide a place for translators to publish their translated songs.
  • To stop the same song from being translated many times over.
  • To provide a method of developing a standard preferred translation for each song.
  • To encourage a greater sharing of resources between churches and denominations.
  • To recognise good song translation as a gifted and inspired art, not as a linguistics exercise.
  • To promote collaboration as an effective method of developing song translation gifting and talent.
I've done quite a lot of work on it and I'm almost ready to launch it, initially as a beta version, and I'll invite a few worship leaders I know to contribute to it too. Lets see what happens...

For anyone interested you can take a look at the test site here.
Feel free to sign up and start contributing, but don't pay too much attention to things not fully working or the lack of content.