Minutes

Monthly EC Teleconference

September 3rd, 2016

14:00 p.m. CET

Please notify the secretary at [email protected] with changes, additions, or motions for this meeting.

 

A.  Call to Order:  Please be sure that any background noises in your area are eliminated since the sounds make it difficult for participants to hear.  When speaking, please say your name first. This will help us record your name with your input.  Thank you.

1)  Open with the Serenity Prayer

2)  Tradition Nine: ACA, as such, ought never be organized but may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

 

B.  Roll Call of European Countries:  Majbrit, Denmark, WSO Vice Chair/European Chair;

Jeffrey, Prague, Czech Republic, EU Finance and Literature

  Sub-Committee Chair/WSO Board Trustee

C.  Establish Quorum

 

D. Guests:Alexia, Germany

Michael, Ireland

Dembreigh, Munich

Marty, Holland

Henry, Finland (Guest Speaker)

Iuno, Spain

Linda, Latvia

Dennis, Moscow

Non-committee members are welcome to listen to this teleconference but are requested to remain silent unless asked to participate. We respectfully request that guests hold their comments until the end of the meeting. If someone needs to talk further, they may do so after the end of the meeting.

 

E. Majbrit announced she has been in contact with Anna from the Polish fellowship. Anna intends to join the next EC conference call. She concluded with a reminder that the EC Annual Conference is being held in Moscow, Russia on the 23rd of September, 2016.

Jeffrey announced that the first shipment of books is on its way to Amazon.co.uk. This is the conclusion of months of research and eight months of work from the moment they had authorization to proceed to when the order went out to the shipper. The expectation is that by the end of September, the books will be available for purchase. People who are signed up for the EC mailing list will be notified when they are available through email.

F. Jeffrey announced the guest speaker for the call, Henry G. from Finland:

At 74 years young and a member of ACA, [Henry] has been sober for thirty-eight years and in the ACA program for more than twenty years. He’s translated many twelve step program books from Sex Addicts Anonymous and Incest Survivors Anonymous, not to mention the Finnish BRB and the Finnish Yellow Workbook, which we hope will also be sent to the printers this month. So, Henry, we’d like to invite you now to start telling about your experience in translating, particularly the Finnish ACA literature, but before you do that, I would just like to ask if you can spend a few minutes talking a little about your personal journey in the program because I think it’s interesting to note also that I believe if I understand correctly you are not a professional translator and yet you have translated a lot of ACA literature. So, I think this is quite interesting to hear and realize, so if you can tell us a little about your own personal journey, I think that’s always interesting. So, Henry, the floor is yours.

Henry: Hello everyone, my name is Henry and I’m an abandoned child. As Jeffrey said, I have been in the program for a very long time and my life has been very complicated. When I was in school, the language I studied for the longest time was Latin. But I was in a language class, so we had Latin, German, Italian, English, Greek, Japanese, French, and Swedish, of course because you have to study Swedish in Finland. But, my strongest language, which I use is Finnish and English. I can’t say too much about why I translated, I’ve been a member of these groups and wanted the groups to have the book to use for the recovery [process]. That has been my main reason to do the work.

From here, Henry related his experiences translating material for the ACA fellowship. Henry was gracious enough to write down what he planned to say during the call and provided it to the minutes keeper. While not verbatim to the call, what follows is an edited form of that presentation:

Hi, my name is Henry and I am an abandoned child.

I will give some important points about BRB translation work and also share some experiences we had in Finland during our translation process. The Finnish BRB was the first official translation of any ACA literature to be completed. The translation process took about 3 years with me, myself, working on it full time for about 8 months. I decided to do the work for my inner child. The language of emotions and feelings in our mother tongue. My inner child wanted to know what was written in the book!

First of all, you have to understand that the translation of a book, any book, is just normal translation work. This kind of work is done in all countries. It has nothing to do with the things that happen in our meetings, and it has nothing to do with recovery. It is simply work – the translation of a book that should be done as accurately as possible and as freely as needed.

The work is done for the copyright holder, ACA WSO, and that means that the national board [local ACA groups/Intergroups] of ACA has no power over the translation. Nobody outside the translation group should have anything to say about the translation, and the process and its documents should be strictly held inside the translation group.

I suggested to the translation group that we do our work according to the dynamic translation theory. That is, we tried to give our translated expressions the same power as found in the original book. That means, e.g., if a sentence in the original book was somewhat unclear, we tried to translate it to be equally unclear in Finnish. I still do not know what some of the Promises mean, exactly. If the original expression was in bad English, we tried to translate in equally bad Finnish. We also tried to translate the different speakers so that the reader can hear the speaker’s personal way of talking. The Laundry list is a good example of our dynamic translations. There are very long sentences because Tony A. made it in a hurry. We translated it with equally long sentences to save that feeling.

It is good to have in the translation group one very good translator, one national language specialist, and a person who is familiar with national language orthography. All translations in Finland were checked by these three people. Orthography is the the usage of commas, semicolons, dashes, capital letters and so on, which compared to English, are different in Finnish.

We also decided not to translate some foreign words like depression, post-traumatic stress, dissociation, and so on, if the word is often heard in meetings. That means it’s familiar as a foreign word. Appendix A was very challenging to translate because of its psychological and scientific terminology.

We had also to invent some new words! The word “reparenting” had no good translation in Finnish, and so we created a new word which has been widely accepted. We also had to find a good translation for the word “Generational”. The idioms were very difficult because they are different in different languages. E.g. we had to find out how we say “Easy does it!” in Finnish.

We used Word and its commenting ability to do the work. Many translations were sent back and forth four to five times before they were ready.

How did we do it?

There was one ACA who asked the whole ACA community to participate in the translation process. About 20 ACA’s were interested. All of them did test translations which were evaluated. In the beginning, we tried to make a dictionary. It did not help very much.

Then we had a teleconference where we decided the guidelines for the work, how to work, some typographical decisions, the usage of ACA instead of the Finnish version, and so on. Then some of us made a test translation for ACA WSO.

After that came the agreement from ACA, and in that situation, I was chosen to be the chairman of the translation group. All translations were required to go through me. We also decided to work in pairs so that the preliminary check work was done inside the pair.

When the work finally began, there were only 10 translators left. The work took quite a lot of time, and after a few months, I contacted some pairs which had not sent translations to me and asked what their situation was. Some pairs had not begun the work and some could never do it.

When there started to be finished translations of some chapters, I had to send them to the US, where from there, they were sent back to Finland to a professional translation office. They checked the translation and sent it back to US and the comments were then sent me. I checked the comments and made the corrections that I decided were necessary. Usually, the verdict from the translation office was that the “translation accuracy is excellent”.

When about half of the book was translated, there were only two translators left, me and one other. At that point, I decided that I would translate it alone if need be. But luckily, there came a few good, new translators to help finish the work. When the book was fully translated we got help from a Finnish language teacher who read through the entire book and made suggestions for better Finnish.

The translation was ready in May 2011 and was sent to the US for the layout. The first layout came to me in July, and as I had warned, the hyphenating was impossible for a person who couldn’t speak Finnish.  Part of the layout work came to me, and I had to learn how use InDesign for the layout. At the end of September, it became clear to me that I would have to hyphenate the whole book manually. It took one week of very long workdays.

After that came the pictures, their texts, the front cover, and so on. It took about one year from when translation was sent to US to when I finally got the printed book in my hands.

During the translation process, there were many disturbances from outside the translation group, but I could manage them by saying that the group had made an agreement with ACA WSO, and that the work is being done for ACA WSO, which is the only organization with the right to evaluate the translation.

Many ACA’s contacted us directly to try and affect the translation (they had personal ideas regarding how Higher Power should be translated, how God should be translated, how different steps … and so on). I said to all of them that if they want to affect the translation, they must be a member of the translation committee, undersign an agreement with ACA WSO, and make a test translation of a few pages from the book so we can see if their knowledge of English is good enough. They did not do it.

This is the end of the document Henry provided. From this point forward, everything is a transcription/paraphrase of the call contents as per usual.

Henry: This, in short, was our experience. Thank you.

Jeffrey: Thank you very much for sharing that Henry, it was a very interesting and story of if I understand it correctly, the Finnish BRB was the very first piece of ACA literature translated into a foreign language. What year did this take place?

Henry: I got the finished book in my hand in May of 2012.

Majbrit: The Danes and the Finnish were competing at the time. It took us 7 years to translate our BRB and the experience was almost identical to what Henry is describing. When you start translating, people show up, but in the course of years, people will leave the translation committee because it’s too strenuous for them to do both that and a full time job. So yeah, thank you very much Henry.

Our Danish BRB came out in 2013, but it had to undergo a very lengthy process in Denmark as well. We were done with our translation in 2011, but because of technical problems, we had it coming out in 2013. So we were competing. (laughs)

Henry: Yes, I know. (laughs)

G. Open Call

Guests were invited at this point to ask Henry any questions that occurred to them during his presentation. The conclusion was that he was thorough and no one had any questions to ask so Jeffrey asked the first one.

Henry: I think that when people read this, they will have questions. They can send the question to me or you after that.

Jeffrey: Of course. I do have a few things to comment on regarding what you said because I’ve been more involved in the process of finalizing the translations and now also setting up local printing, which again didn’t exist when the Finnish and Danish BRB were being translated and printed. They were always printed and shipped from the US. And now everything is moving to Europe. We’ve also updated the translation agreements since then and we’d like to try and get Intergroups involved in signing this agreement as well, for two reasons actually.

  1. Sometimes some translation groups or committees can get stuck and bog down the process and they need maybe an external force from the intergroup and the fellowship to say “hey, look, let’s take that away from you for the moment and work on the problems that you’re not able to solve, or whatever. So that can be one issue.
  1. Obviously another issue is that then the Intergroup has to take over once the translation is finished and concern itself with local printing and distribution. So, that’s one of the reasons we get a local Intergroup involved as well.

Regarding your comment Henry that this is normal translation work, I would have to say that maybe you are lucky or the Finnish language is lucky in that sense, because from my personal experience and anyone else’s experience’s I’ve come across so far in translating this literature, they have not had any luck with any external agency that translates all kinds of material. When they do translate it, it is very much, I don’t know, it’s a strange translation with some of the terminology and things like that. But we seemed to have luck in Finland, maybe both with your group and an agency you recommended, I think it was EditPro that did the final proof reading. They seemed to be able to understand it or be involved with it in a way that it wasn’t a problem. Having said that, I’ve asked them for contacts elsewhere in Europe and they’ve given me some and those contacts were not able to be of much help with 12 step literature.

Henry: There is a special language we talk in 12 step groups and you have to know the language, and I know, because I’ve been in many of these groups. Also, our partner in EditPro which was the professional translation service, learned, or I taught him that we talk this way and this is a real way to talk about these things. He learned it very quickly. He’s very good.

Jeffrey: Yes, [chuckle] well all I can say is congratulations to you guys. So you should be able to crank out every other book very soon.

Jeffrey & Henry: [laughs]

Jeffrey: One last comment regarding the hyphenation issue. My understanding from Robin is that the BRB, at least in Finnish used to be hyphenated, and that was a decision made by I presume a previous Board member. Now we no longer hyphenate any words that we can avoid. There might be some exceptions like in a table when you have to squish words together in a small space. In normal conditions, we no longer hyphenate any words in the ACA literature which should save lots of trouble for anyone in the future because no one will have to go through and do what you did again, Henry.

Henry: It’s necessary to hyphenate in Finnish because our language has some long words. It means that the book doesn’t look nice when the words are long and the lines are sparse or compact. I can’t say the words, but you understand me.

Jeffrey: Yes, well I guess it was your decision to do it that way and if the local fellowship would like to do, then that’s perfectly up to them. But as a general rule, we try to avoid that, but I do understand the point you’re making. Some words in Finnish are very long, I’m curious to see how that comes with some of the German words since they can be equally challenging in terms of length. Alexia, if you’re listening, keep that in mind [chuckle].

Henry: I was in a meeting three weeks ago and there was a new person. She had been in the group one or two months and she talked in the meeting. She didn’t know about me or anything. She said she was a reporter and she’s writing a lot. She had read the BRB in Finnish and she was astonished how good the translation was. That was wonderful to hear.

Jeffrey: Okay, is there anyone else who would like to ask any questions regarding translation?

Marty: This question is for all three of you. [For] group conscience, during the translation and with proofreading and so on, what are your experiences and what has it [the translations] done for the country when they were finally out?

Jeffrey: How about we start with the second one first. Henry and Majbrit, you can talk about what happened when the BRB finally came out in your local language.

Henry: It was sold out in a few months. It was very, very, popular.

Jeffrey: How many books did you order the first time, was it 500 or 1000.

Henry: I think it was 700.

Jeffrey: What was the effect on the fellowship. What was the feedback or resonance people were hearing because they finally had it now?

Henry: It seemed to me that it activated the whole community.

Jeffrey: Yes, so it very much stimulated the growth of ACA in Finland. Majbrit, how was it in Denmark?

Majbrit: I’m very happy that Henry was telling us about how to create a translation committee and how to set it up and how to prepare people so that you can actually support one another and work as a couple, where you get to know the procedure and one another in a special way so you can lean on each other. Because what happened in Denmark was that we had actually ten people in the translation committee and two years before it was done, we only had one person. And only one person had signed the contract. He was not working on the book. Another guy who had translated for other fellowships and was an old timer, almost 30 years in AA as well and a translator of AA material and was an English teacher with a special way of getting things done, because he knew the spiritual programs he got everything in there. He actually gave this finished translated copy to the guy who was holding the contract. He said well, let me just do the index and send it over to the WSO, but what happened was he took one and a half years to correct what the other person had already done. It became a one-man book. He even wanted us to call it anonymous adult children instead of anonymous children of alcoholics because he was not from an alcoholic family, but from a dysfunctional family. He thought it was his privilege to do stuff. It ended up being a very huge fight and we now have a book that we need to edit back to what it was when the other person, the first person [AA Old-timer], had translated it. So we’re in the process of trying to change some of the things because he even left out things in the book when he translated it back to what he thought it should be. So our translation is okay, but it’s not sublime or state of art like we should have. Danish is a difficult language like Finnish, but that’s to say we have short words in Denmark and it’s easier for us to find words to use. But we struggled with the exact type of words that you [Henry] described. Reparenting, recovery, all those kind of words. We struggled to find the right concept of that. So that was the process.

But what happened was, I think we ordered a thousand books, we got a pallet of books shipped from the US and it was sold out in seven months. So I think we’re on our third print run now. But what happened was that my home group meeting, when we had a full meeting, we’d be like 10-11 people. That would be a huge meeting at the time. After 2013, our meeting exploded. It’d be like 30 or 40 people in the meeting and we even had to make a new meeting on a Wednesday to actually be able to fit into the room we had the meeting in. That’s to say, we went from 26 meetings when I joined the WSO in 2013 to 58 meetings.

So that’s the influence the book has had on the fellowship in terms of growth. 10 months after the BRB, we got the Yellow Workbook. So both of them might have had an influence on the growth of the community. To me, it had very significant growth because I could read the language of my inner child. It’s so important. It made a huge difference connecting to the text emotionally. What came out of that was also that the structure of the meeting, I mean we had a meeting where we were dumping our feelings and sharing the sickness, but after having read the BRB and doing the step work in our language, the meeting changed to become a meeting for the solution. So people changed their way of sharing at the meetings when we had the literature in our own language. That was very significant actually.

Henry: The danger that some person would influence the translation with his or her personal view was also a problem in Finland. We had to be very, very careful to make accurate translation and not change the book.

Majbrit: Yeah, it seems to be the people involved in translation are very responsible. You might say over responsible. For them, signing a contract with the WSO is like signing a contract with their parent. They trying to please the WSO and really be held accountable for that contract. So much so that they might misunderstand that they’re accountable and that it’s their book [they might misunderstand and think that the book is theirs since they have the contract instead of understanding they’re doing translation work for the WSO and the book ultimately does not belong to them as an individual but to the WSO and that the book is to be used by all in their path towards spiritual recovery.] This happened in Russia and it happened here in Denmark, even though we had years of recovery even before we got the translation.

We had 15 years of the program in our community. I think it’s important, the point you were making Henry, that it is not our book. It is still owned by the WSO and this means that we are essentially working for them. But also getting a correct translation means we have to be very mindful and meticulous in spot checking and doing proofreading on our literature before handing it in. That means when we get the BRB, they’re only spot checking a small portion of the book. That might create a statement that the book is excellent, but what about the rest of the book? That’s where this guy who was translating our book had been told that it was an excellent translation that he had done, but when we got the book, there were whole pages that were still in English. They hadn’t gone through the whole book, just spot checked it. 700 pages in and you can’t read everything in there. That’s to say that people who are translating need to be very mindful of everything they’re turning in. It’s on us as a fellowship for what we hand in as far as the quality of that book is concerned. I get that when you proofread the book 5,6,7 times that you’re fed up with it, but it’s hard to get new translators to come in with fresh eyes to edit it.

Jeffrey: Thank you Henry and Majbrit, I’d like to move to the second question that Marty brought up regarding the group conscience. I’d like to start out with a quick idea or two on that because it addresses some of the points that Henry and Majbrit brought up. I think the group conscience plays a huge part on the translation process, even as brought up by Pipi last month. This can happen in many different forms, obviously the translation committee itself is a group conscience; the tandem pairs are a group conscience; when they get stuck, reaching out to the fellowship or even having a workshop, as Pipi mentioned, is a group conscience. Finally, I think what is being translated needs to be circulated with particular members of the fellowship as an unofficial, unapproved translation, of course, just to make sure that input from the fellowship on some of these ideas is coming into play and also making sure that everything in the book is translated. I think clearly that someone from the intergroup side should be looking at this and asking if it is fully translated before it goes to the WSO. There is a lot of back and forth, but in the end, the verification process isn’t much different. The real verification, in my mind, has to come from the group conscience because there are no translation agencies that specialize in this type of content. The best we can do is utilize people who have translated things like this before, such as AA or another 12 step program, to verify it.

Majbrit: I want to comment that the WSO, when we put out new literature, we put it up on the webpage for 90 days for comment. This is also a possibility that if you have a webpage or an internet forum for the translation committee, people can come into this type of forum and leave their comments. We just need to be aware that we put it in a PDF file so that no one can change the wording of what has been translated. We did this with the Danish meditation book that we are translating and are in the process of getting feedback because we adopted the model of the WSO. More to the point, getting a piece of literature into your own language and making it our own is only possible if the groups and the meetings have a feeling that they had a say in it, because what we experienced early on in our childhood is people being unfair to us. So including people and asking for their input is important, even if they don’t give it, is an important part of making people feel like it’s their own literature.

Henry: Our group conscience was used for the translation of the laundry list, the steps, the traditions, and the promises. It meant that everyone in the group, there were 20 of us at the time, everyone had the chance to say something about the translation of these things. It was a very long process and we had difficulties in the translation process, like in step 2, because the translation in AA in Finland at the time wasn’t a good translation. It took a while to figure it out to get a good translation. In AA [in Finnish], they had it translated as “We learned to accept a higher power.” The word “learned” wasn’t so good in that translation. We shared the problem with the whole group and everyone had a chance to come up with a better way to say that sentence.

Majbrit: “We became aware” is three words, but in our language, we also had to change it because in Danish, you don’t use three words like that. We had to invent a lot of words for our fellowship that just don’t exist in our language, and as Henry said, they had a long discussion about the right words, a glossary you might say. But the WSO at the time didn’t have a glossary for the English concepts or constructed words or an explanation for those words. It’s kinda been like free range, free interpretation in the fellowships, and many fellowships I’ve heard from have the same problem, like in Poland. The strict approach to which AA has to stay sober, kinda like they dictate how it’s done, they’ve adopted that in ACA. By doing that, they’re setting aside that everybody has a voice. It’s really becoming a problem in Poland and I’m going to talk to her more about this next week. That is to say, if you take the other fellowships 12 step literature into account that you need to know that it might be a poor translation. You can’t lean on that or all the concepts and ideas that are in AA literature because the spirit of the ACA program is different from the AA program or NA’s program. We’re the only program that deals with emotions. As an example, in AA literature, they have 16 different types of Anger. That’s just to say it was translated wrong because they’re supposed to be angry. And that was translated in the Danish edition. So for many, many years, AA’s in Denmark were afraid of getting angry because that would trigger their rage and they would start drinking again, but the translation was wrong. This type of thing can affect a whole fellowship if we don’t get the translation as close to the original one as possible. I completely agree with Henry.

Henry: What Majbrit said about angry. It’s the same thing in Finland. They say you shouldn’t be angry and that’s crazy. You must be angry sometimes. [laughs]. Also, tradition six was a bad translation in AA. We corrected it, but they have their own program.

Jeffrey: Thank you Majbrit and Henry. We’re coming close to the top of the hour. Does anyone have any questions regarding translation or anything else unrelated they’d like answered?

Iuno: I have a quick question. We sent our translated literature two years ago and I was wondering how long it takes the WSO to verify translation.

Jeffrey: Yes, Iuno, in this case. It’s a special case, and I have to apologize for this on behalf of the WSO, because of Spanish. I have not been involved in this, it happened before I came on the Board. This case is special because of the Spanish language. As a result of this, there is a special committee on Spanish translation as part of the WSO’s Literature Committee that’s been trying for years to create an international Spanish edition of the BRB. Now, I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish, I can’t say if that’s a good idea or a bad idea. Nonetheless, it’s out of my hands. Having said that, I had a call with the Chair, Larry, and asked why there can’t be a Castillian Spanish version if they have the translation done already. He said that it might be an idea. I need to bring this back to the translation committee’s attention. I don’t think it’s fair you submit a translation like that and don’t get clarity on when it will be available. Obviously, at the end of the day, it’s up to the WSO to decide on how to proceed. But this seems to be, for some unclear reason to me, that the Spanish translation is a unique problem/challenge. I’m not aware, I’m not involved in that committee. It’s not the normal case. The normal case is that it’s verified in a couple of months and you get it printed in a couple of months. We’re trying to shorten that time down to 6 months from when the translation is complete and when it’s in your hands. I’ll get back to you on that.

Iuno: I’ll send you an email anyway because we were wondering if we could translate some other things.

Jeffrey: [emphatically] Don’t stop translating because if you have it, I can try and push it through the Board then. I can say “look, we have all these books backed up, what’s the deal?”

Majbrit: What I know is that we have a huge success story in Europe, people showing up, doing the work, the Europeans getting connected with all these countries. It seems to be the same problem all over, that the WSO has changed their way of working from having completely voluntary people doing the distribution and sales of books and thereby there were some decisions made. One of those decisions I heard was that why do we want to have just a Spanish book. Why don’t we make it an international Spanish book so we only have to publish this one book? But this brings up the problem that the British should have their own English version, the Canadians, the Australians, the new Zealanders should have their own as well because the dialects there are different. I’m totally with Jeffrey that we need to push this through the Board because it’s a piece of work and you need to get validation. Our program is all about validation and confirmation and you need to be acknowledged that you actually did the BRB.

Jeffrey: I just want to add Iuno is that part of that shipment going to Amazon is several books of the Spanish Yellow Workbook as well. So there will be the Yellow Workbook. I don’t know if it’s international Spanish, Spain Spanish, etc. I just know that a Spanish edition of the Yellow Workbook is included, so later on this month, your fellowship will be able to order Spanish language workbooks from the UK.

Iuno: As Majbrit said, there are differences between Spain Spanish and South American Spanish. The Yellow workbook is Spain Spanish. We can understand other Spanish speakers, but the differences are pretty large, like words mean different things. That’s why we think having an international Spanish version isn’t the best idea because as you said before about the different ways to be angry, that would confuse Spanish speakers from Spain. Maybe we should just catch up by email.

Jeffrey: I agree.

Henry: Do you know anything about the Finnish yellow workbook. It has taken a bit of time.

Jeffrey: Yes, part of that is because I’m a volunteer like everyone else and I’ve been trying to get everyone a book with only so much time. The situation though is this, I’m waiting on the Finnish Intergroup to get back to me with a proposal I sent them several weeks ago on how we set it up in terms of pricing and printing. I’ve given them information, I just assumed they’ve been on holiday. As soon as they get back to me on the details, then we move to the next stage which is finalizing contracts. We’re looking to maybe do that and have it printed in Latvia because it’s much cheaper which makes it cheaper for everyone all around.

Okay, it is now past three o’clock. Does anyone have any burning desires to ask a question?

Alexia: Yes, here in Germany we already have half of the BRB, part of the Yellow Work Book, and the whole Daily Meditations translated but not confirmed from the WSO. As soon as we can, we are going to edit the translation. We acquired last month the original German ACA service contract and next week we’re going to start with our translations with a committee that has already signed it. Right now we are 7 people and we have one native English speaking person also. I would like to know where we can find the new translation agreement. Also, I asked Majbrit for contacts from the Munich group and I heard in the call that someone from Munich is here. Is it possible to get into contact with her?

Dembreigh: Yes, you can get in contact with me. We would love to get in contact with you because we were thinking of translating those things, so if we can get together, that’d be fantastic.

Majbrit: I just want to say that I contacted Will, but he never got back, so I prayed to the higher power that someone from Munich would get on this call. The Higher Power really does work!

Jeffrey: So Dembreigh, how did you find out about this call. Are you on our mailing list as well?

Dembreigh: Yes, I was on the mailing list but I was always too busy and almost wanted to resign. But I joined the call and said to myself that I’m going to keep at it. I’m very happy that I joined today!

Jeffrey: The latest translation contract can be found at adultchildren.org/translations. There is a lot of information, including the latest translation agreement.

Michael: I just want to say that we’re very happy with the American version of the book. I mentioned it at the last meeting and we think the English is perfect and wouldn’t be looking for any translation at all. Secondly, we’re delighted the books will be on Amazon.co.uk soon because the shipping was way too much.

Jeffrey: Absolutely, but as you can see, this part of the reason it was never tackled because it is a very complicated process and a lot of this is being done by volunteer people. This is something we have to change as a board, we have to professionalize. We have to employ full time managed people, people who can manage these things, because at the end of the day, we’re basically running an international business in terms of publishing and you can’t do that with volunteers. It doesn’t work.

Michael: But we’re delighted with American version. The English is perfect in it for us in Ireland. I mentioned a separate Irish English version briefly after last time [Pipi’s presentation], but I don’t think there is any need. I mentioned it to some members and they don’t think there is any need for any extra work specific to Ireland.

Jeffrey: Okay, good to hear that.

Majbrit: I just want to mention that maybe this will explain something because I think it’s important, our sister fellowship, AA has one full time employee for every 100 meetings that they have. If we should have the same, we would have 16 full time employees in ACA because we have 1600 meetings. That’s not the case. We have 6 board members and four half time staff. So this may be an explanation for why things take longer.

Jeffrey: Thanks Majbrit. Does anyone else have anything to say before we close this meeting?

Dennis: Thank you very much Henry for experience and Majbrit and Jeffrey for your Service. I just want to say welcome to Moscow in September.

Jeffrey: Thank you, we’re looking forward to it as well.

Majbrit: You can probably expect to get requests for invitations to Russia for visas.

Jeffrey: Okay, anything else before we close for time?

Alexia: You asked for a number for the literature intergroup, but there is no group. There is only the regional service committee now and no literature. There is no number for this group, Majbrit.

Jeffrey: Okay, thank you. If there is anything else, we can take it offline. I just want to remind everyone that the next meeting is always the first Saturday of the month at 14:00CET which is, oh gosh, looks like October the 1st. So that’s pretty much it for this call.

Majbrit: Sorry to interrupt, I just want to remind everyone that Jeffrey has sent out details on how to go in and listen to the call, so if anybody out there wants to listen in to the call, they can do so.

A motion to close the meeting was seconded, and the meeting was closed with the Serenity Prayer.

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