Office Staff

Just a quick update on our office staff.
Back to front and left to right they are: Vasia, Peter, Kostia; Maria, Lilia, Ulia, Alia; Ira and Julia.

Lena isn't in this picture and neither, of course, am I. There are also three other men who work from their homes.

Vasia and Lilia are married and expecting a baby in December. Lilia is our key Russian editor. She oversees that process as well as makes sure that we turn out really good quality Russian work. She's been with us for close to 3 years. In her free time Lilia also runs an orphanage ministry with several teams visiting orphanages every week and leading Bible clubs there. She will be going on maternity leave and then working part-time, probably from home, for us after the first few months. Vasia joined us last December as a formatter. That means he makes the books look good! :) It's a tedious, repetitive job, but it makes a huge difference to our books to have a good layout.

Peter is our grammar editor. He makes sure that the grammatical flow in Russian is correct and sounds right. Russian grammar is a lot more complex than English so this takes more effort and time. He is quite meticulous and sometimes I have to put a little pressure on him to move on with the material because he gets so caught up in the details. He's also our footnotes expert--we've had a lot of grief over how to do English footnotes in Russian! Peter has some health issues and last here he had some trouble with his heart, partly brought on by stress here at work, I think. Thankfully, we've been able to resolve those issues and now he seems really at ease and happy, and healthy.

Kostia is our key translator/consultant. He's been with us for over seven years. Over that period of time his health has seriously deteriorated. I believe it is partly because of the climate here as he gets terrible migraines whenever it rains, and it rains a lot here! In the office, he is by far our most valuable person for the course work. Not every translator can carry the spirit of an author forward through translation, but Kostia really has a gift with this and he has redone many poor translations so that the Russian texts now have the same life that the English texts have. Additionally, he's very good with computers and helps solve a lot of our computer problems here. Because he's been with us since we first started the office, Kostia is familiar with the whole process and is able to find new or better ways to do things, or sometimes explain to me why things are done the way they are. I consult with him a lot, esp. when my parents are traveling and I need advice on different issues.

Then there is Maria. She is our bookkeeper. She does an excellent job and has been working with my parents for more years than I have! She not only keeps excellent books (she recently received a commendation from the Canadian mission about that), but she is very faithful and willing to serve in any way that is needed. Her husband is a pastor/church planter, so she is primary financial provider for their family right now.

Ulia is Peter's daughter. She began working with us while she was still in university studying to be an English teacher. She graduated this summer and for now continues with us. Her work primarily involves comparing the initial Russian translation with the English to make sure that nothing has been missed or updated in the English, but not the Russian. With some of the older, poorer quality translations this has been a big issue. Now we are retranslating several of the courses, because the changes in English are too big to just try to fit into the old translation. The translation quality is better, but now sometimes I have her translate small portions and updates that I have made to certain materials, instead of sending them to our out-of-office translator.

Alia is our key formatter. She does the same job as Vasia, but at a higher level. We had to train Vasia in from scratch. He knew nothing about formatting, but Alia came with previous experience at a newspaper. She's a very capable person and a huge asset to our office as she is not one to sit around and do nothing, nor is she afraid to make suggestions (it is difficult for people to make suggestions here because that implies that you--the boss--are not doing something right and of course that didn't go over well in previous years, and a lot of that still lingers on). Alia also works with the pictures and graphics for the courses and lectures. She helps to prepare the covers for the books as well as making usable any pictures in the text and updating any charts or tables.

Ira is our newest team member and she is the beginning of a new project: translating the courses into Ukrainian. This is a new project for our office, some of the courses have already been translated into Ukrainian, but sadly they refuse to use our newer versions and often the translation quality isn't as good. So we have decided to do some ourselves, to show what kind of quality is possible. Right now she has been hijacked into doing some translation of the lectures instead of courses, which will be a problem for our course production in the future, but is an urgent need right now. She is just learning the ropes of translation in the style that we want, but she definitely has a gift for translation.

Julia is our secretary/lecture person/additional editor/anything else we need her to be. She is a huge blessing! Originally, she was hired as a secretary to answer the phone, buy supplies, and take care of some of these basic office tasks, but since she is efficient and we are a small office she had free time and we started her working on the lectures (dad has a series of lectures on DVD for extra encouragement, training and discipleship for leaders--there are about 150 lectures total). She compares the English and Russian versions, does editing, cleans them up, works with the studio guy to make sure that that keeps progressing and in general does a lot of stuff that I (thankfully) don't know much about. In the past we have not had one person for this job, so it has been a bit of a mess. It is a real blessing to have her doing that. Occasionally, she has gaps in her work, or we have urgent needs for our course work and she steps in and does some editing as well. She's a quick learner so it's easy to have her do a variety of jobs. Now with Lilia going off to have her baby she'll be helping do some of Lilia's work.

Lastly, for our in-office-staff, we have Lena. She was originally hired in the hopes that she could help with some of the smaller translation projects that frequently come up, but we've managed to keep her busy doing a lot of other things instead! Now she is starting some of those projects which is very helpful. Additionally, she will also be helping take over Lilia's job.

This turned out rather longer than I had intended. I'll try to come back tomorrow with Lena's picture and a continuation with my job, our out-of-office staff and anything else pertinent. ;)