Testimonial

Shane Farmer shares his positive experience working with Evan to solve Revolution Church’s translation challenge.

<aside> 💡 “We came to Evan in need of the ability to streamline a very difficult but critical recurring project for our work. What we needed we knew no one had ever done before and that it had a lot of complexity to it. Evan’s ability to create a solution, have it work the first time, and quickly and consistently improve it in the testing period has been incredible. We highly recommend him!” — Shane Farmer, Lead Pastor, Revolution Church

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Overview

Revolution Church has an exciting mission to plant 1000 churches around the world. These churches are aligned with common values, purpose, and leadership. One way alignment is maintained across campuses is by delivering common teaching that originates from a single place. Teaching originates at Revolution Church’s main Denver Colorado USA campus and is broadcast to satellite campuses. This broadcast model is straightforward with English speaking campuses but has unique challenges when reaching other parts of the world. A common teaching must be understood across a diverse set of countries, languages, and cultures.

This model was put to the test when Revolution Church launched its first international campus in Mexico City. The high level plan was to record a video of the English teaching, transcribe the English, edit the English transcript, translate the English to Spanish, edit the Spanish transcript, record a voiceover of the Spanish in sync with the English speaker, then edit the Spanish audio into the original video with translated graphics. The completed Spanish video would then be shown to the Mexico City campus on a one week delay from the Denver campus. Revolution Church has a service with unique teaching each Wednesday and weekend.

This presented several difficult and unique challenges:

All translation activities must be complete within a week of original English broadcast date for the Mexico City campus to keep pace with the Denver campus.
Two teachings must be processed each week to keep pace with the Wednesday and weekend schedule.
The original English teachings are pre written but deviations are common. In order to perfectly align with the video an exact English transcript is required.
Translation from English to Spanish is extremely nuanced with many domain specific Christian words and ideas.
Spanish text is about 20-30% longer than English so special care must be taken to align Spanish audio to the video without the Spanish voiceover sounding rushed.

This vision and the challenges involved in this project were extremely daunting for the organization. The unique challenges meant off the shelf software or a manual solution would not meet the objective.