After launching pages for Spanish and Japanese last year, Brigham Young University has expanded its Speeches Collection to include Portuguese and French. Other languages will continue to be added based on demand and translating capacity.
Since 1972, BYU has published its weekly devotionals for public access, going online in 1996 and extending the blessings of BYU devotionals to anyone with an internet connection.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown significantly since 1972, expanding well beyond the North American continent. Church membership today is over 17 million and includes 188 published languages. That means a greater demand for uplifting Church content.
BYU speeches “blend the scholarly with the sacred” as they “enlighten, uplift, instruct, and give hope to listeners,” says the About page at speeches.byu.edu.
“BYU Speeches is a remarkable archive of inspiration and knowledge that extends the blessings of a BYU education to everyone,” said Lena Harper, editor of forums and faculty devotionals for BYU Speeches. “Because we recognize the value of these talks, we are actively seeking ways to better provide that content to enrich your life.”
A partnership with the BYU College of Humanities provides most of the funding and provides special learning opportunities for students and language speakers. Machine translation produces an initial translation, language students at BYU review and clean up the draft translation, and finally the speech is sent off to native speakers for a final evaluation. The text is then uploaded to the website, made available for all visitors to read or listen to.
The translation process will continue to make the BYU Speeches Collection available to members worldwide. “We’re hoping to gather more resources to expand up to 10 to 12 languages,” said Charles Cranney, senior manager of Digital Media at BYU Brand & Creative, who oversees the translation initiative.
It was the expertise of the college in language and translation that, according to Cranney, helped the program get off the ground.
“This wouldn’t have happened without the College of Humanities,” he said.
“By creating translations for key speeches, we meet a global need while giving language students and native speakers inspiring learning opportunities in their field that are unmatched elsewhere on BYU campus,” said Alayna Een, social media manager of BYU Speeches in a recent blog post. “As we expand our translation efforts, we hope to share the unique light of BYU and bring messages of hope to people around the world.” The BYU Speeches team invites all to help “spread the word — in every language — by sharing these BYU Speeches pages and social media accounts with everyone in your personal network: friends, family, mission connections, coworkers, classmates, and community members.”
Native speakers of available languages can ask questions or request translations of specific speeches by emailing:
- speeches@byu.edu (English)
- speeches.spa@byu.edu (Spanish)
- speeches.jpn@byu.edu (Japanese)
- speeches.por@byu.edu (Portuguese)
- speeches.fra@byu.edu (French)