A translator's job...

Well here I am about to go away to an inter-religious meeting about conversion.
I'm supposed to be interpreting there and was rather looking forward to sitting at the back of the meeting with headphones on.
However, last minute panics mean that I've been spending the last couple of hours finding some interpretation equipment and working out how to carry it on the train down to Toulouse. the interpreters are not going to be too happy to only have a "bidule" to work with and not proper headphones. Anyway it will be much better than consecutive or whispering which would have been the alternatives.
At least that means that I haven't even begun to remember all of the things I've forgotten to do before I go, that'll start as I sit down in the train tomorrow morning!

So this blog is really supposed to be about conversion, I wonder how many of those attending the meeting will have gone through what might be called a conversion experience. Have I? That's certainly not the way I talk about my faith usually. Though there was a weekend in my youth when I can remember a very strong sense of calling to service or ministry, but that wasn't really conversion from one faith to another but perhaps conversion to more or a deeper faith. Hmm well that's wat I'd like to think anyway!

It's easy for people like me to just take the faith I was born into for granted. Yet as I think of conversion I think of seeing my German grandfather kneeling in prayer in an Anglican church - in the country that had adopted him as a refugee, he practised the faith he had converted to from Judaism ... and only decades after his death do I realise quite what a path of adoption and inculturation that must have been. German Protestant Christians usually stand to pray and sit to sing, they rarely kneel. Even aged 10 with my grandfather in the church I knew that I did not come from a tradition that knelt to pray, and I sat next to him at evensong, feeling no doubt in some childish way proud that I knew enough of myself and my church to know I did not kneel and yet also feeling that perhaps I was misisng something. My grandfather converted from secular Judaism to state Christianity so as to marry my grandmother but his was not I think a faith of convenience.

So as I set off from this little vilage of Ferney Voltaire, a region torn apart by religious wars over the centuries I do wonder how we shall speak about conversion, will it be possible to come to agreement about it, will it simply be acase that each will need to share from their own perspective and agree to differ...

And finally before bed and a very early start please note that despite being an editor and translator in another part of my life I am not going to worry here about whether I write organize or organise, baptise or baptize nor care too much about my punctuation. Apologies in advance - yes I do care over passionately about such things normally but not here ok, it already means that when reading Harry Potter I'm distracted by whether commas are inside or outside the quotation marks, so I htink blogging has goto to be about the literary equivalent of sartorial casual dress - and be warned my typing is dreadful. No doubt I need to convert to linguistice purity and perfection. Bed I think