Mohamed ElGohary

As part of the commemoration of the Volunteers Day, Global Voices sent this survey to our translation, aka Lingua, community. I may be working now for Global Voices, but I joined Global Voices originally as a volunteer translator. The survey constituted of three questions: Why have you started to translate, why do you continue to translate and what has GV given you.

Global Voices 2010 Summit in Chile, my first trip with Global Voices. Photo by David Sasaki on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I joined Global Voices as a translator, so Lingua was the first Global Voices department I came across. I primarily joined because back then, in 2009, Arabic content was only 1% of all the Internet, although there are at least 300 million Arabic native speakers. I wanted to be a reason to increase Arabic content on the web and I think I'm succeeding in that directly and indirectly.

I continue translating to know about places I never been, check out cultures I never experienced, learn about intellectual treasures I would never read about in an ordinary book or an ordinary news piece.

Global Voices gave me a lot of things. To get along with people from all over the world. Getting to know friends in the Global Voices community from many backgrounds and at the same time like minded in the basic set of values. Global Voices gave me the opportunity, directly and indirectly, to go more than 20 countries in the last 5 years.

Global Voices satisfies the feeling to be connected to a movement that is doing some good to a large group people, and to give some influence even if it sounded small at the time of contributing.

Global Voices showed me as first-hand experience how can experts in all fields of life can dedicate their time and energy to a greater goal.

Finally, I would love to say a big THANK YOU to all Global Voices community, you make my day every single day. And for anyone who didn't do that yet, I urge you to check out profiles of our amazing community by visiting us here.