Since the year 1995 FRMI has been involved with Bible translation work in Cubulco, Guatemala. During those year much has been done in translating the Old Testament into K'ub'ultzij (the correct name for Cubulco Achi). We hope to be be finished by the end of this year with most of the steps in the translation process. However, we still have a few bottlenecks that we can not seems to get around very easily. One of them is finding a consultant to check and validate the translation. We really need help with this since it has to be an external expert, which are not easy to find.
Apart from translating the Bible we have also been involved with producing other material that will help promote the language and can be used in the churches. For many years we worked on producing a hymnal. We had one printed a number of years ago with less than 200 hundred songs in it. In the mean time we worked on translating more songs. We decided that we would stop at 250 songs, and so in the year 2010 we had the final version of the hymnal printed with 250 songs in it. We also worked on producing a dictionary and grammar book and initially we printed the books separately. However, after selling all the books and making changes and adding more words to the dictionary we decided to print the dictionary and grammar book together. This book is very much sought after especially by students and teachers. Another book we recently produced has been a illustrated Bible Story book. We had a printed the first edition a number of years ago, but what we did not know was the it only had 20 stories from Genesis till Ruth. Regardless of being incomplete the book sold well and it was necessary to print the second edition this time with 50 Bible stories: 30 Old Testament stories and 20 New Testament stories. Just last week we received these books from the printer and will begin promoting and distributing them in Cubulco. The books are relatively inexpensive ranging from $3-5/piece.
I ask that you continue to pray for the translation team as they are finishing up their part of the translation work. Pray also that we will be able to find a consultant or two that can help with that step of the work so that in 3-5 years we can completely finish the translation work. We currently have one consultant doing some work for us, but since he is busy he can only do several chapter per week. We need someone who has more time so that the work will go faster. The consulting work can take anywhere from 2-5 years.
