(Minghui.org) In our team there is a practitioner who is very diligent. He has translated the headline articles every day for years, without missing a single one. But he also makes a lot of small mistakes in his translations. I am responsible for proof-reading and publishing all translated articles every second week. At the beginning, while correcting his articles, I felt uneasy inside, because I had to make corrections in almost every sentence, and proof-reading his articles took more time than reading translations from other practitioners.
After thinking about how I could help him improve his translation skills, I turned on the change tracking feature while correcting his articles. When I finished the corrections I sent him the corrected article, hoping that he would use it for improving his translation skills. But he often repeated the same mistakes over and over again. I began feeling even more uneasy, started developing bad thoughts about him, and felt that he was stubborn and careless.
But from the other side, I was afraid of showing my dissatisfaction because he translated by far the most articles for our Minghui website. So I was in a situation where I felt anxious but was afraid to express it.
I felt that something was wrong with my cultivation state, so I started to look inside. I found that my uneasy feelings were due to my selfish wish of not wanting to work hard. My fear of expressing my criticism openly with that practitioner had the same root - I was afraid that he would lose motivation and translate fewer articles, so I would then have to do more myself.
So I realized that my effort to help him improve his translation skills was impure: My wish to be more efficient in Dafa work was mixed with my selfish interests and fears.
I also realized that I was being rather impatient and expecting to see results after I made an effort to help him. When I didn’t see much improvement I became discontent. I was unable to just keep doing what I was supposed to do in the best way I could without expecting anything in return.
I also started to eliminate my bad thoughts about him. I tried to look at the situation differently, not thinking about what he was not doing well, but cherishing what he was doing well. With his help and diligent translation of headline articles day after day, we were able to increase the number of published articles and publish all headline articles without missing a single one for a long time. He also pushed me and other members of our translation team to be more diligent because he showed us what is possible.
I realized the power of our good cooperation. Each of us has some shortcomings but also unique strengths. When we manage not to look at each other’s shortcomings negatively but try to compensate for them, then we can do much more together than each of us individually.
For example, this practitioner could translate articles every day, but without someone correcting his articles daily, the quality of the published articles would be poor. Other practitioners pay lot of attention to quality, but don’t have enough diligence to translate articles on a daily basis. Without the first practitioner, there would be many fewer translated articles, and some important articles wouldn’t be published in a timely manner. But together, these practitioners were able to publish many high quality articles in a timely manner. This is the power of good cooperation.
After I purified my thoughts, I started cherishing more and more what this and other practitioners are doing and I no longer harbored any bad thoughts about this practitioner.
I started proofreading his translations without thinking too much. I just tried to do my part of the work well, and I cherished the completed article as the result of our cooperation. When I saw some mistakes over and over again, I wrote him an email about it and asked him politely to pay attention. Sometimes it turned out that we had different understandings about the correct way to translate a word or phrase.
After some time, without my thinking about it, his translations improved a lot, so now I don’t need to spend as much time correcting them.
This experience also helped me correct my negative thoughts about other practitioners in other settings.
Thank you, Master. Thank you, fellow practitioners.
(Selected Experience Sharing Paper from the 2018 Minghui Fa Conference, Abridged)
