As part of commemoration of the Volunteers Day, GV sent this survey to Lingua, community. I maybe working now for GV, but I joined GV 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 GV as a translator, so Lingua was the first GV 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 speaker. 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.

GV 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 in 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.

GV 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.

GV showed me as first hand experience how can experts in all fields of life can dedicate their time and energy for a greater goal.

Finally I would love to say a big THANK YOU to all GV community, you make my day every single day.