(Minghui.org) Greetings, revered Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I want to share some of my experiences from working on English Minghui.
Master’s Arrangements Are the Best
I started working on English Minghui in 2000. At the time, it had been less than a year since I came to the U.S. to study, and my English writing ability was not very strong. But this project really needed people, so I started doing translation.
My biggest takeaway from working on this project all these years is that, as long as we have the heart to do this project well, Master will make the best arrangements for us. When I needed skills to do translation, Master gave me wisdom. When I needed more time, Master arranged a job for me with flexible hours. The skills I developed on the Minghui project helps with my ordinary job, and the knowledge I gain from my job also helps me do better with Dafa projects. More than once I have sighed in admiration at Master’s brilliant arrangements. Everything is arranged for me to elevate in cultivation and fulfill my mission to assist Master in rectifying the Fa.
When I first started doing translation, even though I usually wouldn’t make grammatical mistakes, my word choices and sentence structure were very Chinese. I clearly remember one article that mentioned a practitioner who was about to give birth. I translated the expression directly, and a Western practitioner changed my translation to a more colloquial expression. From that point on, I paid attention to how Western practitioners spoke. I also started reading articles in American mainstream media and observing how they wrote different types of articles.
I found that my work on Dafa projects helped me improve my English writing ability. One of my doctoral advisors read my thesis and said with surprise, “Your English is very strong.” He said he couldn’t imagine that an international student who had been in the country for only a few years could write so fluently. I knew that this ability had been developed through my Minghui work.
Meanwhile, as a student I was required to read many academic papers and learn how to do research. I was also a teaching assistant and had to teach four hours of discussion classes each week. My studies and teaching in ordinary society also helped me learn Americans’ ways of thinking and how they express themselves, both verbally and in writing. Thus, in my translation work I pay more attention to how to make articles easier for readers to accept.
After graduating, I continued my research and teaching and had more opportunities to interact with American society. My work experiences all helped with my Minghui work.
Master said in “Fa Teaching at the U.S. Capital,”
“The focus for you right now is simply to find ways to do better, to be more efficient, to have a greater impact, and to save more people.”
Every article we translate should have the potential to save sentient beings. However, if the translation is inaccurate or inadequate, our readers will not want to read it, and the article won’t achieve the effect it should. My work in ordinary society has trained me to be more efficient and consider things from the clients’ perspective. When I translate for Minghui, I thus pay attention to how to make our articles more effective in saving sentient beings and how to expand our readership.
While translating articles, I often feel Master giving me wisdom. English words often appear in my mind, and I just need to write them down. My ordinary work has also benefited greatly. While I spend a lot of time on our project, I have to devote a lot of energy on writing papers for my ordinary job. When I needed to produce a paper, Master would give me the wisdom to do research. Sometimes, when I didn’t know what topic to write about, I would suddenly feel that Master had given me an idea, and I would know what kind of research to do.
I held online training for our fellow translators for about a year and a half. Interestingly, soon after I started, my university also began to hold large-scale online classes. Compared to our usual face-to-face mode of instruction, online classes were very different, but the online training I held for Minghui gave me many ideas for my online university instruction.
Many times, I have felt Master’s intricate arrangements for my cultivation and ordinary work. I cannot find the words to express my gratitude to Master.
Cultivating Patience and Capacity
In the past few years, in addition to doing translation myself, I have also been responsible for training our fellow translators. My job was to help fellow practitioners better translate Chinese Minghui articles into English. In the beginning, I put a lot of effort into writing training materials and giving feedback to fellow translators. But some of them kept making the same grammatical or other mistakes. I corrected them time and again, but some still made the same mistakes. I was very frustrated and inwardly resented other translators for not paying attention to the feedback I provided and for wasting my valuable time. I kept complaining to one coordinator, and she always patiently encouraged me to have patience.
Master said in “Fa Teaching at the 2013 Greater New York Fa Conference:”
“As a cultivator, whatever the case, you are someone on the path to divinity, and as you know, a person on the path to divinity is of course different from a regular being, or an average person. But you do your cultivation among ordinary people, so in terms of your conduct, or even your dress, your manner, or your speech, there won’t be any difference to speak of from ordinary people. There is just one, major difference: when experiencing conflicts or tensions, or any situation, you are able to look inside yourself for the cause, [thinking,] “Is this because I did something wrong? Is there a problem on my part that caused this disharmony?” This is the only noticeable difference between you and an ordinary person.”
I slowly realized that it was not my fellow translators who had problems. Rather, it was I who had a problem. I was demanding that others use my own standards and ways of doing things, forgetting that each person has his or her own method of learning and rate of progress. I knew that I needed more patience and a bigger capacity. I thought of how much patience Master needs to save us. Just looking at myself, as a Dafa disciple, I have too many things that are not up to standard, but Master has never given up on me. I often feel Master giving me wisdom to carry out the training work. I realized that I cannot impose my own standards on others, nor can I demand that they reach a certain standard within a certain amount of time. I cannot change others; I can only change myself.
Amazingly, after my mentality changed, our fellow translators seemed to have suddenly made a breakthrough and stopped making the same mistakes. Their translation quality also began improving. Within a year or two, our team made a big improvement in the quality of our translations. Something I initially thought was impossible had undergone a qualitative change.
What I learned from this experience is that when we look inward, everything around us will change. On the surface, I am the one training others. In fact, it was an opportunity arranged by Master for me to cultivate myself. I am often moved by other disciples’ pure states of mind. Each of them has a family, work, life, and other Dafa projects, but they find time to work on Minghui and do their utmost to do this project well. I have only respect and admiration for them. I am very thankful that Master has arranged for me to work on Minghui, to work together with so many diligent disciples.
Cultivating Away Complacency and Selfishness
One coordinator often reads English Minghui and gives us feedback. I was initially thankful for his suggestions, but slowly I grew impatient. I felt that we’d spent a lot of effort on each article, but he kept nitpicking. I felt that he didn’t agree with our principles for translation. When he again sent a string of emails asking about certain articles, my patience seemed to run out, and I became very frustrated. It happened that I had been busy at my ordinary job during that time, so I decided to stop working on this project. I replied to him and sent copies to two other coordinators in the project.
Their responses made me realize how temperamental I was. They did not fault me. They reminded me not to forget my purpose for working on Minghui. That was my mission; how could I casually give up this project?
After calming down, I felt ashamed of myself. I had done so poorly facing this test. I realized that I had grown complacent while working on the training program and did not want to hear others' suggestions. I developed vanity and a mentality of protecting myself and the team I oversaw. When I saw that this coordinator’s suggestion was for an article translated by another team, I thought it had nothing to do with me. But when his feedback related to my team’s articles, I would be much more concerned.
Master said in “Teaching the Fa at the Meeting with Asia-Pacific Students:”
“There's something you must pay attention to: you are validating the Fa, not validating yourselves. A Dafa disciple's responsibility is to validate the Fa. Validating the Fa is cultivation, and what you remove in the cultivation process is none other than the attachment to self; you can't, instead, go and exacerbate the problem of validating oneself, even if you do it unwittingly.”
I realized that I had developed selfishness and that my reason for working on Minghui was no longer pure. I only wanted my own team to do well but did not care about how other teams did. This was a manifestation of selfishness and self-interest. I only wanted to validate my good English and strong ability. I had forgotten that our various teams are one body, that our common goal is to translate articles that people want to read, to achieve the effect of saving sentient beings.
When I went back and read that coordinator’s feedback again, I was thankful deep down for his spending the time to read our articles and give us feedback. I saw that his suggestions were pertinent and that we did have areas where we needed to improve.
I thank Master for giving me this opportunity to remind me of my purpose for working on Minghui. It is not to validate myself or to show off my English ability. It is to validate the Fa, to save sentient beings.
Cherishing This Cultivation Environment
This project requires spending a lot of time in front of the computer each day. Furthermore, out of security concerns, we cannot tell other disciples what we’re doing. Sometimes I feel tired from the work and want to find some fresh projects to work on. But I quickly understand that this is where my mission is, that I am doing this not for my own pleasure but to assist Master in rectifying the Fa. I see other disciples who have worked on this project longer than I have, and they are all working quietly and steadily with no complaints, because they are fulfilling their missions in this project. I now understand that this is the arrangement for my cultivation. Every disciple has a different path of cultivation. I can work on other projects when I have time, but my mission is here. I cannot give up.
Thank you, Master!
Thank you, fellow practitioners!
(Selected Experience Sharing Paper from the 2018 Minghui Fa Conference, Abridged)
