If you have the burden to start a new language section on Answering Islam ...


A list of steps to take: 

1. Research already existing materials 

a. Search the web and find those sites or pages which you think 
  are providing good articles and create a links page. That will 
  help you not to duplicate work that has already been done. Also, 
  this will potentially give our readers quickly some good material 
  with minimum effort.

b. Which material exists already in print? Could you approach 
  the publishers and request permission to bring those materials 
  online in order to reach a wider audience? Often Christian publishers 
  or mission agencies who published them will be happy to give you 
  the electronic files. If they are from a time before the electronic 
  age, then look into the possibility of scanning them in (as text, 
  not as images) with an optical character recognition software, 
  or consider typing them (perhaps you can find somebody at your 
  church who would like to do this?).

c. Carefully think about the issue what kind of material is most 
  needed in your language group / country / culture? 

  E.g. evangelistic tracts to proclaim the gospel to Muslims, 
  introduction to Islam for Christians, defense of Christian 
  faith against the Muslim attacks, testimonies of converts from 
  Islam to Christ, critique of Islam, .... well, the categories 
  you find on Answering Islam), and when you know what would be 
  most needed and helpful, then either translate some of the 
  articles available in English language into your language, 
  or to write your own, if you find none of the English ones 
  fit exactly what you think is necessary for your target group.

In my view, it is important to start with some positive material, 
i.e. gospel presentations, testimonies, etc. before material that
criticizes Islam is published. Our goal is win people to Christ, 
not to bash Islam. Critique of Islam is necessary, but should 
always be done with a balance of offering Muslims something 
more attractive, not only trying to take away from them their 
current faith.


2. There is much more than translating to establishing a section 
on AI. You need to learn how to format webpages, how to make them 
look good, how to interlink them. We want to be available for our 
readers if they have further questions. Will you be able to handle
the feedback correspondence? Try to find others and do this ministry 
as a team -- some with the gift of translating, or researching 
and writing, others with the technical skill of a webmaster, and 
a third group of people to handle the personal correspondence that
will arrive soon after some pages are online. At the beginning, it
may still be possible that all these functions are handled by one 
person (that is how I started the English site), but as it grows, 
it will be necessary to find others to join in the ministry.


3. As soon as you have a links page and one or two articles,
I would gladly add those into a new language subsection of 
the site. The design of that site I would leave to you. 
The Malay and Russian brothers have made their own:  
www.answering-islam.org/Bahasa/
www.answering-islam.org/Russki/
while the Arabic brothers have taken the original design of 
the English site and only changed the text in it: 
www.answering-islam.org/Arabic/  
I would leave that decision with you. Whatever you are most 
comfortable with.

Some technical issues: 

You would have to create the webpages in your language "ready to upload". 
I cannot do further proofreading, coding or any other changes. I would 
only receive the pages from you, and upload them to the site. (I cannot
give you the access to the site itself... actually, I don't have that
access myself. We have made it pretty complicated to access and
created our own update mechanism, because of the heavy hacker attacks 
we have. It is a security issue.)

I will be most happy to assist you every step along the line, 
even tutoring on the creation of webpages (html coding etc.) 
if necessary. 


Jochen Katz
Answering-Islam.org


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Update: March 2008 --  We will switch to a database and content management system.

Currently we are experimenting with Typo3, one of the largest and best known such systems.

We would prefer if you could start the new section by using Typo3. 
We would then give you an account and you can develop the materials 
directly on the server.