By Paul and Gosia Jaworski, Adelaide, Australia
Editor's Note: Urantia Foundation has recently agreed to print a translation of The Urantia Book into Polish. Gosia and Paul Jaworski provide some background about their efforts to translate the book and their phenomenal efforts to share their translation with the Polish speaking world.
Our names are Gosia and Paul Jaworski. We were born in Poland. In 1985 we migrated to Australia with our two sons. We are a married couple living in Adelaide.
We discovered The Urantia Book in 1995 when reading the Encyclopedia of Paranormal and Mystical Experience. A short time later we checked out the book from the library and started reading from the papers about physics and astronomy. We learned that "vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric potential" can be only neutrinos, the existence of which was experimentally proved in 1956, a year after first publication of The Urantia Book. Very soon after, we bought two copies of The Urantia Book, and from that day, our lives changed profoundly - so much so that in 1996 we began to translate The Urantia Book into Polish, a few papers at a time for our Polish friends who could not read English.
We started the Polish translation of The Urantia Book with Urantia Foundation in 1998 as a three-person team. One member of the team resigned after translating three papers. We, Gosia and Paul, continued translating The Urantia Book into Polish.
During our visits to Poland, we sent many reference books to Australia covering almost every subject of The Urantia Book- dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and atlases. We knew we would not be able to find such reference books in Australia. Wikipedia didn't exist at that time, and internet sites in Polish were rare.
In 1999 and 2000, when in Poland, we placed ten books in various university libraries. This method of placement was greatly expanded in 2001, when we arranged to have books sent to Poland from Urantia Foundation's Finnish and French offices. All together, 78 copies of The Urantia Book were placed in 67 Polish libraries.
For the first draft of the Polish translation, Paul translated Part I, II, and III, and Gosia translated Part IV. This work was edited five times. Sometimes our discussions about which Polish word best expressed particular English meanings would become very passionate. Some parts of the text we regarded as difficult, some relatively easy. During the first editing we found that some of the "easy" parts did not look as good as some of the "difficult" parts. We corrected the not-as-good parts in subsequent edits, and we realized that nothing is easy in this translation. All parts must be considered equally difficult.
Quality and accuracy were given preference over quantity as we edited the first draft five times. When some Polish terminology didn't exactly match English meaning, we first checked dictionaries, then reference books, then literature, and then the internet. If something still was inconclusive, we would consult a university professor, and an elaborate answer usually came in a few days.
In 2000 we started a website in Polish about The Urantia Book. This helped Paul become proficient in website design. To date this site (http://members.optusnet.com.au/~pmjaworski/ [2]) has had about 106,000 visitors. Mr. Wojciech Chudziñski, a well-known Polish journalist, found this website and wrote his first article (2 pages) in 2003 about Ksiega Urantii. This article was published in a Polish weekly, Express Bydgoskia. In 2004, Mr. Chudziñski wrote a six-page, very positive article about Ksiega Urantii, which was published in a Polish monthly, Nieznany Swiat. Despite writing about various channeling issues in this article, The Urantia Book was the leading topic. He also mentioned Martin Gardner and his critical book. With this, Chudziñski included Paul's severe criticism of Gardner's opinion. We think that Polish readers won't regard Martin Gardner's criticism seriously. We provided many materials for those articles and were interviewed via email.
Wojciech Chudziñski is now working on a book about many new age issues, and he plans to include a few pages of information about The Urantia Book. (It is favourable, we already checked.)
On March 7th, 2004, there was a new age program on the Polish national TV channel, and The Urantia Book was introduced to a wider Polish audience. TV presenter, Ms. Cecylia Wielogradesz, presented the book using information we provided.
In 2006 a web designer from Poland, whom we know only by his email and company name (Solar design), sent us, for free, a complete website with our Polish translation and beautiful graphics. We put it online right away.
In 2005 we began another website placing one new paper every month of the Polish translation, Ksiega Urantii. Since that time our email correspondence with readers has become intense, and we answer many varying questions almost every week. Whenever there was a delay placing a paper on the website, we were flooded with emails asking us what had happened.
In December 2006 a full text of the Polish translation was placed on the following website with the option to download it: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~mpjaworski/ [3]. The average number of visitors jumped from 16 to 76 visits per day. Today the total number of people to visit this site stands at 64,000; 38,000 of them downloaded the full text of Ksiega Urantii. At present we receive one or two emails a week from Polish readers.
There are scores of discussion lists in Poland where Ksiega Urantii has been mentioned at least once. Usually we do not participate in such discussions, even if somebody says that he or she doesn't like the book. But we always post on a discussion list if somebody distorts the teachings of the book, exalts the Lucifer Manifesto, or says that the Universal Father is cruel. In such circumstances we respond with a friendly but detailed refutation of their misrepresentation of information in the book.
In February 2009 we assigned the copyright of the Polish translation to Urantia Foundation, and Ksiega Urantii will be printed soon.
We are eager to see many more translations in print and to see the Urantia Revelation spreading to all the nations, races, and religions of Urantia.