For years Africans told me, “Your translation work is not well known. People should know about it.” The thing is, I didn’t know what to do about that. We weren’t trying to keep it a secret. We did tell people what we were doing, so I couldn’t figure out what we might change. In the last few years I have started to see what Africans meant and why it is important, mostly by observing what Ghanaians are doing in the translation programs when they have the full freedom to do it their way.

When we first arrived in Africa, we were sent to a village in the southwest of Burkina Faso. With help from translators in a neighboring language, we contacted missionaries in the area, met with a few local officials and set to work. While I was briefly acting director in Côte d’Ivoire last year, we officially started the translation into the Abure (pronounced ah-boo-RAY) language. The process was quite different. First, some well-known Christians from the language area were contacted about the translation. They formed a committee composed of representatives of all the major churches. Then they informed all the pastors, chiefs and officials of the plans to do a translation of the Bible into Abure. All of this culminated in a public event to which all the churches were invited and most attended. It was lead by people well-known in the language area. At the ceremony, an agreement was signed detailing how the translation would proceed and how the churches and Bible agencies would cooperate.

Only after the ceremony, was the translation program considered to have officially started. Having a public ceremony to launch a translation was something I first saw in Ghana in 2012. In found it significant that in both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire people who didn’t know each other and who were unaware of each others’ actions spontaneously started translation programs the same way.

Prayer at the launch of translations in three smaller languages in Ghana’s Volta Region

Public ceremonies, it turns out, are key events for informing everyone that the translation is taking place. I finally figured out that I could spend a lot of time going around telling people about the translation without accomplishing what can be done by visiting a few key people then holding one public event. Because chiefs and leading pastors attend, the whole community sees that they support it; a key to getting others to volunteer. I have also seen them become important fund-raising events. Finally, after the public event, everyone in the community, even those who do not attend, are thought to know about the translation, because the communities are very effective at spreading information by word of mouth.

But public meetings are about more than spreading information or raising funds. They give the translation program something nothing else can – legitimacy. Programs that are not publicly launched can attract suspicion – what are they hiding; why don’t they make themselves known? But programs that start with a public ceremony are seen to be transparent and have the endorsement of the right people; so people can trust them, contribute to them, and recommend them to others.

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