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On Partnership

It seems to me that we spend a lot of time talking about partnership, but sometimes our language betrays our true affiliation. We feel we belong to one organisation, and work in partnership with another, but can easily say things like:

'That's not our project it belongs to <organisation name>.'

Or:

'We don't have any personnel in that project, apart from a consultant who visits regularly.' (!)

If <organisation name> is a partner organisation, in what sense is it not 'our' project (in the collective sense of the word)? And if we have a consultant giving advice to that project and approving their translations for publication, how are we not involved?

Partnership is one of the Eight Conditions, albeit the last (but not the least). It is only in last place because Wayne Dye added it after the other conditions, and in a sense it holds all of them together. Without partnership our efforts are in vain.

In any case the true owners of the project are the local people, not the organisation working with them. They, the language speakers, are the only true owners of the translation project. Those of us who serve as consultants, coordinators, exegetes, and so on, are not there for prestige or material gain. We are truly there to serve. One ways of showing that service is by learning to speak that local language, rather than using a lingua franca to communicate with the team, though that isn't always possible.

So let's not talk about 'our project', 'my project' and so on, unless we are more careful in what we say.
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