I want to share with you my experiences of the work that I do on a Dafa website and also to tell you about my downfalls and my newly gained understandings throughout this process.
A short description of how we started out
I am the editor of the Russian version of the Minghui website. When I was offered to take on this responsibility in the year 2000, there were only four translators. Although in Russia I received a professional education that prepared me for editing work, I could hardly imagine how I could do such important work at that time. I felt like I didn't have enough experience, and didn't have a deep enough understanding of the big picture of what this important work entailed and what it could influence and affect in the world of cultivation. However, it had to be done. I understood one thing: Minghui is the only source of truthful information about Falun Dafa for the Russian-speaking community. This site must fulfill its role for practitioners and society during this period of Fa-rectification.
At first we could hardly put up five to six articles a day, and almost every translator had to submit one to two articles daily. I was sending out the article assignments to the translators, coordinating their return, posting to the web and doing all the editing. This method of doing things continued on for years, until I started to seriously analyze the situation and was helped to recognize some of my shortcomings by other veteran practitioners. I finally started to acknowledge my attachments, which acted as impediments on the road to improving the way the site functioned and developed.
Dafa work is cultivation
At that time it seemed to me that no one could do this job better than I. I didn't recognize anyone else who could share at least some responsibilities with me, aside from the actual article translation. Aside from the work for the website, I also actively participated in editing Teacher's new articles and lectures. All of these things shortened my time for improving coordination with my fellow practitioner-translators and contributing to our Whole Body. We should have made more time for Fa study and experience sharing. I was doing a lot of Dafa work, meanwhile I was decreasing my time for studying the Fa and almost entirely stopped performing the exercises, even though I tried to maximize my time by sleeping five to six hours a day. When the situation became critical, I was finally able to look within myself. Other practitioners with benevolence in their hearts started pointing out my shortcomings. I then realized that everything that was happening was not due to my attempts to improve the quality of Dafa work. On the contrary, it was a manifestation of my attachments to finishing my own work without help, my selfishness, the wish to establish myself in front of others and most importantly the result of my lack of trust in others. I then thought to myself: How can I fulfill the responsibility bestowed upon me by Teacher with such attachments? Then I realized it is not enough to theoretically know how a practitioner should act, study the Fa and do Dafa work, it is necessary to immediately apply these standards to my own behavior and to live my life according to the principles laid out in Zhuan Falun. I realized I should set my mind upon leaving all human sentiments behind and doing the three things that Teacher told us to do well. I also came to understand that Teacher utilized this situation to reveal my attachments. I discovered an attachment to coordinating and being in charge, and understood that I need to learn how to be more patient when working with others, to respect others' point of view and to incorporate their input. This was a very important realization.
At that point, conflicts were arising from all sides and problems were appearing. It wasn't easy to start the process of change because the work patterns that needed alteration had been laid out years earlier. The hardest thing to change was one's own view of the situation. As soon as I enlightened to the real situation, the rest was easier to settle, because righteous thoughts lead to the correct path and things start to fall into place. I was acquainted with a fellow practitioner who introduced me to Dafa, however I neglected to ask her to help me with the website work. We started working together. I helped along, and in time she became a co-editor of the site. The workload became lighter, and suddenly there was a little time to think about restructuring the way the work was being done and about improving the flow of work.
The special role of the Russian version of Minghui for Russian practitioners and the ordinary Russian people of the world
All of us know about the role of the Minghui website and about the great emphasis Teacher has put on it from the very beginning. For Russian practitioners, this website also plays a very big role, even a special role. Why? Because not all practitioners, even in our time, own computers, and not everyone that has a computer is connected to the Internet, or their Internet access is very restricted. This is not a very cheap service in Russia. In other words, it is very important to help get the materials posted on our site to those practitioners because that is their only source of information. There are very few Russian practitioners who know English well enough to be able to access the English Clearwisdom site. In order to help practitioners with these problems, the weekly version of Minghui was organized. Articles are picked out by a practitioner who lives in Russia and posted on the local Falundafa.ru site. We'd like to post them on our site as well, and these issues are currently being resolved with the webmaster. In this way, practitioners who have problems with accessing the Internet can log on only once and download the weekly article selections. This can also be done by the group coordinators, who then share the printouts with the rest of the practitioners attending their local group study.
Russian practitioners have a lot of unique problems. Factors such as the influence of China's Communist mentality, and the Russian government's cooperation with the Chinese regime to suppress Falun Gong, create a lot of hardships and interference, as well as increases the difficulty with which practitioners can spread the Fa and clarify the truth to save sentient beings.
Due to my attachments becoming an impediment in the development of the site, time was lost and we all needed to work harder for what was missed. I went to a Russian Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference and realized that our site wasn't really being read a lot by practitioners in Russia. Besides the above-mentioned reasons of why the site wasn't as helpful to Russian practitioners, the real reason was that the site wasn't performing its role to its fullest potential at that time. It was time to improve the site's reputation and to make it such that it could really destroy evil. It needed to fully reveal the facts of the persecution, allow Russian practitioners to read the experiences of others who have enlightened to new understandings, and widely announce the Falun Dafa events happening all over the world. At that time it seemed to me that by improving our site we could awaken the hearts of our Russian practitioners and help them catch up to the progress of Fa-rectification. They would do so by starting to clarify the truth from all angles in order to diminish the evil's influence and to save as many sentient beings as possible. While answering questions at the New York Conference in 2007, Teacher said:
"At present, the most important thing is to save sentient beings, save more people! That is the most important thing." ("Fa Teaching at the 2007 New York Fa Conference")
Our website also participates in saving people - and this is precisely the form that Teacher has picked out for us on our way of cultivation. Because our site is now being read by a large number of people, our responsibility is great and our efforts, our understanding of the Fa, as well as our xinxing levels really influence the effectiveness of the process of saving sentient beings.
Positive changes involving site work
Several years ago Russian practitioners came to a Dafa conference from Russia. I went to see them after the conference. We met in a tiny room of a hotel in Manhattan. We talked about a lot of issues. I started talking about the importance and meaning of the Minghui site for Russian practitioners. Teacher helped to strengthen my righteous thoughts and I spoke about the purpose of the site and about the fact that it was created during the most difficult time for Dafa. This was done with the goal of letting the world's people know the truth about Dafa.
I noticed that this conversation made an impression on these practitioners. After returning home, one of the practitioners wrote a letter about several practitioners in Moscow who would like to become translators for our site. This way we were able to significantly increase the number of translated articles that were coming in daily. Aside from the new Moscow additions, most of the Russian-speaking practitioners in America also decided to join in on the effort. There appeared even a few practitioners from the Ukraine. Our team was growing larger and larger. It was becoming more and more difficult for my co-editor and I to individually send out articles to be translated to each practitioner and to track down their responses. We decided to split everyone into groups. We divided the translators by regions: the American group, the Russian group, the Ukrainian group, a group from the far corners of Russia, and a group of Russian practitioners with knowledge of Chinese who were translating directly from Chinese to Russian. In total, five groups were formed. At that point we had over 30 translators. We delegated the coordination and assignment of articles to a practitioner, who was previously only working on translations. Each of the formed groups had a coordinator, so she would sent the articles that needed to be translated to the coordinators only and they would then assign them among their group members. The coordinators also keep track of how many articles each member could handle and regulated the flow of incoming and outgoing translations. We also picked out several practitioners in each group that could act as editors for the articles that their group translated.
When the site was created, the mission was to spread the facts of the persecution as much as possible. The site was created in a hurry because we wanted our media to carry the truth about Dafa. We hardly thought about the quality of the translations and about the professionalism we put into our work. Now it was time to think about these things. At present, several groups have a multi-step process of preparing the translations for web publishing. First, the article is translated, then another practitioner reads the translation and polishes it, then another practitioner edits. This way, the articles posted on the net are of a much better quality than before.
It became clear that for all the people working for the Minghui website to work harmoniously, it became necessary to create our One Body. That is, to study the Fa together and share experiences. That was a big omission in our work before. So, every other week we started to have meetings for the translators of our site. First, we study the Fa for about an hour, then we speak about the work of our website, and about our problems and plans, and then we share our cultivation experience. I usually send a notice in advance to all translators the outline of the next meeting, so they will know the topics we are going to discuss and have time to think about it, maybe write down some experiences to share. We always share our impressions and understanding of important US events, public meetings and actions with Russian practitioners-translators during the meeting. In fact, the translators are the first recipients of the updated Falun Dafa information, and they are able to pass this important information to practitioners in Russia and other regions. These meetings became a revelation for all of us: we really got to know each other better, but most importantly, it gave us an opportunity to improve together in the Fa and it has positively affected all work on our website. The importance of Teamspeak both for cultivation and Dafa work cannot be underestimated.
Recently, we decided to try to use our Teamspeak for one more purpose: we started to have special Teamspeak meetings for improving the polishing and editing. First, I did not really know how to carry this out, but I was certain that we needed to raise the quality of the translations. I decided to try to do it in the following way: I sent in advance the same copies of 2-3 articles to each translator and underlined the sentences that we were going to talk about at the meeting. This way, they had time to look them through and think about the way to translate them best. Then, at the meeting we would analyze each sentence, correct mistakes and emphasize why the corrections were necessary. We analyzed different topics: grammatical, stylistic and syntactic. Sometimes I do not underline anything so that translators could find places which need to be corrected themselves. I also do my best to help translators to be active and to participate in our work and discussion. Sometimes I choose to work on particular mistakes. We have already had about 6 such meetings. Practitioners say that this helps them in their translation work and it's very effective.
I'd like to mention one more thing. All of us graduated from school quite a long time ago. Some of us either forgot or never even knew many grammar rules. The Russian language has a rather difficult grammar, and it is really important to use it correctly. If a comma is used incorrectly (and in the Russian language the rules for punctuation marks are more strict), that can immediately "betray" the general level of literacy of the author of the article. It's not only the practitioners who read our website. Therefore, we recently have decided that during such meetings we'll do a brief, 10-15 minute review of grammar rules. We have already done one brief review of this kind, and next time another practitioner will prepare a review of another rule. It might be that we haven't chosen the best format yet. A lot still needs to be thought through and improved, but the main thing is that this process has begun and has already shown results.
At the present time, we receive an average of 12-15 articles per day from our translators. Sometimes it is less, sometimes even more. Therefore, it is possible for us to translate all recommended and important articles without exception from the Clearwisdom website. Currently, we try to publish no less than 4 articles about persecution, articles about traditional culture, and of course we translate practitioners' experiences and insights. On average, we publish no less than 10 articles per day, and often up to 12-13 articles per day. Certainly, there are also failures, but we have less and less of them. At the present time, we are in the middle of getting several more editors ready for work, and this will enable us to publish up to 15 articles per day, including the articles that are currently being left behind due to needing corrections. Additional editors will be able to correct and prepare these articles so that they will be ready to publish. We have already involved approximately 5 translators in this editorial work.
We also have some plans for the future. We would like to publish on our website video information about the actions which take place in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. This is the idea of a practitioner from Ukraine who works for NTDTV. He told us that there is a group of reporters and cameramen who would like to do special reports for the Minghui website. Now this project is under consideration.
In conclusion, I'd like to say that our work depends on the efforts of every one of us. Daily release of our website is a sum of very many tasks, and it is the result of many people's work who do different things for the website. If anyone on our team has some kind of omission, (it is just like in the One body of Dafa disciples), it is reflected in the whole body.
My understanding is that a real effect of eliminating evil and saving people through every concrete article is gained by the mutual efforts of everyone: starting with the person who chooses the article for translation and sends it to the coordinator, then the coordinator, who sends the article to the translator, then the translator, who sends the article for correcting and editing, then the article finally getting to the editors and published. Everyone who participates in this process brings in their energy and understanding, including the author of the article. That's why the article will carry the effect that we ourselves generated. In this way, our website will carry in many respects that power and that effect which corresponds to our group level. The more pure and righteous our thoughts, the more firm our faith in Dafa and Teacher, the deeper our understanding of the importance of this Dafa work, the more powerful will be the energy of truth clarification and saving of the people that emanates from our website.
A little about personal cultivation
Daily work for the website, a large amount of correspondence that requires answers to questions; work with translations of Teacher's articles, coordination of translation of the Kilgour-Matas Report, coordination of translations of the articles for the two Internet Conferences of practitioners from Mainland China (we have translated more than 50 articles), my job in the human world, household matters, care of parents -- all of it has to be combined with daily Fa study and doing the exercises. Sometimes I feel so tired, my righteous thoughts weaken, there is a sensation of pressure upon me and it seems as if I have no more strength left to continue living in such a way. Then I think back to a story told to me by one of the veteran practitioners. She was doing very important and especially responsible work for Dafa, there was a lot of pressure on her at the time, a lot of work needed to be done, and she was in a similar state. When she felt she had no more strength to go on, and that she gave every bit of her will to get the job done, it still wasn't enough to complete her task. She decided to share her troubles with her mother, another veteran practitioner. Then her mother said to her: "You can do it; it is necessary for the future." It was as if Master put these words into her mouth. When I think back to this story, I feel ashamed. My weakness and my subconscious desire for comfort is what makes me question myself, and now I understand that when our thoughts start with Dafa, when they are rational and without human emotion, there is nothing that is impossible. Our abilities and resources are boundless, as boundless and immense as this Fa, which brings salvation to all sentient beings.
I wish to thank our benevolent Teacher for the great honor which he rendered upon us, having given to us an opportunity to participate in such an important Dafa project.
Thank you, Master!
Thank you, fellow practitioners!
