Our Work
THE CHALLENGE
Believe in the Lord your God, and you shall be established; believe His prophets, and you shall prosper. 2 Chronicles 20:20
Seventh-day Adventists believe that Ellen White’s writings speak with prophetic authority and provide comfort, guidance, instruction and correction to the church. These precious truths, however, are wholly unavailable to a vast majority of our church.
Did you know that the complete library of the writings of Ellen White is currently only available in English and no other language?
The official Spanish EGW library, the most translated language, contains only 25% of the 440 existing documents. The German and French libraries contain 15% and 12% correspondingly. Many languages have less than 1%.
Translating is no easy task. Translating the entire library in a traditional way into just one of the major languages would involve the investment of millions of dollars and endless amounts of time. After more than 100 years, the job has still not been completed. That’s why we need a new method, a new approach to translating these inspired writings.
OUR APPROACH
What if all the bilingual Adventists from every nation on earth worked together towards the goal of translating Ellen White’s writings into their own local language?
To answer that question, we looked at the story of Wikipedia—the world’s youngest and yet by far the largest and most successful encyclopedia in the world—and observed their platform. Though much less costly to develop than others, it continues to grow exponentially both in content and influence. Their innovative, open source approach makes all the difference.
Ellen4all provides just such a collaborative platform for EGW’s writings. In a nutshell: At Ellen4all, any church member can translate a text, which will then be edited by more experienced translators until a final version is produced, which will be reviewed by three authorized proof readers and finally approved by a White Estate representative and published on the EGW apps and websites.
In other words, a global community of Adventist volunteers and professionals would translate, edit and verify the translations. In this way, the translations would be improved over time, and the final results of this collaboration would ultimately be provided digitally to everyone in their own language for free.
We are this global community of Adventists, passionate about sharing Ellen White’s writings with the world.