I accidentally attended an amazing service this morning. Well, I deliberately went to the service, but not because I was planning to. Hang on while I explain why this makes sense:

On the stage in the big top tent where the services are held is a small choir (actually, just a quartet) and the tenor has taken to hanging out with the stewards. I was walking from Darwin college to Rutherford at about half 10 last night and bumped into him. After chatting for a while we decided it was too cold and headed back to Darwin bar (Origins). As morning eucharist starts at 7:15, the choir had to be there at 6:15 and we were still sitting in Origins at midnight I pointed out that he probably wouldn’t be in particularly good voice, at which point he threw down a bit of a gauntlet and pretty much bet that I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed to attend the service. Well, if you know me, I’m hardly one to pass up such flagrent lazy-student-baiting, and decided that I would make it to morning praise. Even though I turned my light out at 1:55 this morning…

So, after not much sleep, on the first day I could have had a proper lie-in (I’ve had to do two 6:45 shifts already) I stumbled into the big top. I had forgotten that the province leading worship that morning was Central Africa and, as I didn’t have an order of service or a translation headset, I found my ‘welcome responses’ auto-pilot functioning pretty well and managed to hang on until one of the Stewards’ Chaplains lent me her ‘worship file’. I’m not actually entirely sure what language half the service was conducted in, but it’s actually a pretty weird experience hearing a priest say something in an African language and pretty much the whole congregation reply with english responses!

As far as these multi-language services go, the translation system is brilliant. Each delegate is given a headset that they keep for the duration of the Conference (stewards have to make do with nabbing them each morning…) which has eight channels. The eight official languages of the conference are: Arabic, Afrikaans, Burmese, English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and possibly German. Be prepared for me to correct that list, ha. Each channel corresponds with a language, so at any time you can listen to the service in any of those languages. Theoretically. When I tried that at the half-empty evening service only Portuguese was on… I met the guy who’s the prjecgt manager for the translation system and he explained how they worked if, say, a speech was originally in French (as the translators are all translating to/from English) Apparently the French translator will translate it into English, then all the others will translate from that. Considering how much room there is for error in even a straight translation, there is space for some almighty cock-ups when using a ‘hook’ language like this. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes…

I’m so glad that, thanks to my stubborness, I ended up attending this service – I’m rather childishly fascinated by language and how differently other languages pronounce letters from us. I also remain astonished at how people can figure out word-sounds from pictoral languages! Although the story of Babel paints a picture of different language as something that hinders our working together, I think that, actually, it can help bring us closer. The translators are a vital part of this conference, but by using all these different dialects we are celebrating our differences and the tools we have been given to overcome them. It’s all just one big team-building exercise.