The thing that I find most rewarding is working with the translation teams who have invested years of their lives in this data that they’re giving me now.

In 2008 I was involved in typesetting for the Moba project in Togo. After the Moba New Testament was published and distributed, I heard a story from the translators about one woman who received it. When she read it, she began to cry. She said, “All these years I thought it was only the pastor who could understand what God was saying. But now I’m reading it, and I can understand what God is saying to me.”

Another time I was involved in typesetting for a language project in East Africa. When they had the final draft, they gathered all the pastors of the area to do a proof read of the final draft. One pastor said, “In the past we’ve had the English Bible. We’ve been able to hear God speaking to us, but it was as if he was a long way away. We kept on missing words here and there. But now when we read this Bible, it’s as if God is right next to us, and we can hear absolutely every word perfectly.”

This is what it’s all about – enabling people to hear directly from God. Hearing stories like these is the best possible reward for a scripture typesetter.

I worked together with Sammy Ntumy on the Ahanta New Testament. Ahanta is a language in Ghana. As a goodbye gift when we had finished typesetting the New Testament, I printed out the first page of each book and presented them to him in a little ceremony. He looked at those pages and began jumping up and down exclaiming, “The Ahanta New Testament, the Ahanta New Testament!” This was what he had been working on for so many years, and here was the actual printed version!

It is very rewarding to see how deeply people are impacted when they finally receive the print-ready version of the Bible or New Testament they have worked so hard to translate.

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Collections 2011-2019

November 2019 – Israel

Zetseat Fekadu

Studying biblical Hebrew in Israel

July 2019 – Global

Feature Photos