Contributing your language skills (French & Dutch)

As you may know we are establishing Tilorien Monastery in Belgium, a country with multiple languages. French, Flemish (Dutch), and German are official languages in Belgium, the German border is not too far from the monastery, and the Luxembourgian border is quite close too. In Germany people speak German, and in Luxembourg there are French, Letzeburgisch, and in some areas also German. This means we find ourselves in the middle of many different languages!

In addition to that, a Buddhist monastery is always an international institution, so we have to add English to our list too.

In order to do justice to this situation our two websites (Samita.be & Tilorien.org) are in 4 languages: English, German, French, and Dutch. And this is of course a challenge for those who manage the websites!

Usually we are fine for the English and German part, and you will find most articles in these two languages (although not always perfect ). But when browsing our sites you will notice that not everything has been translated into French and Dutch, or that sometimes translations may sound a bit strange to the ears of native speakers. Our own resources for these two languages are just limited. There are a few people, native speakers, who kindly help us out sometimes, but they don’t have always so much time.

Therefore we would like to find a few more shoulders in order to distribute this work. We are looking for people who are able to translate from English or German into French and / or Dutch. (There is no need to translate all the longer articles that we sometimes post; of course if someone feels inspired to do that, this is fine too.)

If you consider volunteering for this job we would like to emphasise that you shouldn’t “do anything except with the joy of a small child feeding a hungry duck”. This is how work should ideally be done, especially Dhamma work. And if there are enough shoulders to share the burden, no one will be overburdened!

If you are interested to support our work with some translations please email us.