H E RITAG E
“Haven’t you ever heard of Google?”
20 Years of SweMail By Ingemar Olson
Y
es, incredible as it may seem, as of this issue (March 2021) we celebrate the start of the 21st year of SweMail (see the blurb on page 5). The very first SweMail was developed for the March 2001 issue and we’re still here. It all got started with the Dec 2000 issue, which contained a charming “Last Word” fantasy article about a towel, which I wanted to share with my wife (who claims that she knows only one single word of Swedish). But of course the story was in Swedish, so I had to translate it for her. Having done that, I took a look at exactly how much Swedish there was in the magazine, and I thought that with a bit of help it would be quite do-able to translate all the Swedish in the entire issue. With 10 people we’d only need to do about one column of text each. I could then put the pieces together and email it all out to anyone who wanted it. Naturally, this would have to involve some active participation by Swedish Press itself, for publicizing the availability and to act as a central point for folks to send in their email addresses. I sent the translated story to Anders Neumüller and mentioned my idea. He liked it and suggested I write a Letter to the Editor asking for volunteer translators and for people to send him their email addresses. He also came up with the catchy name. Well, we didn’t quite get to my target of 10 translators, but it was enough. Over the years we have had 16 different volunteers participate. Amazingly, of the eight participants that we currently have, three of us have been along for
Ingemar Olson
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Swedish Press | March 2021 18
Bodil Söderberg
the whole ride, and four for most of it. I can’t remember exactly how many readers we had for that first issue, but I’m thinking about 50. Currently I email translations to 134 folks, send notifications about the website to a further 46, and I have no idea how many folks are just looking at the website without me needing to do anything. Lots, I hope! At the beginning, we had to wait for everyone in our team to get their own issue of Swedish Press in the mail before they could even get started on translating anything. I always got mine pretty quickly (being in the same city) but others were not always so fortunate. So there were, shall we say, some delays in the process. Later on I acquired a scanner, so I could scan the relevant pages and email the images to my fellow translators. This sped up the process considerably, not needing to rely on snail mail. These days it is even simpler, since the publisher (Joan, actually) extracts the Swedish pages at about the same time that they are sent to the printer, and I can make these available to our group pretty quickly. Of course, we can’t all drop everything just because a new set of translating tasks arrive in our inbox, so as a rule, I like to give everyone at least a week to do their stuff. Some translators regularly get their contributions done almost immediately and others take the full week. Embarrassingly, the last contributor is often ... me, but no one knows (until now, oops) so it’s ok! After a bit of further editing, like adding a few additional background notes and web links and bringing some stories up to date, the whole thing is ready
Jan Sundin
Inger Beecher
