The Bible should be available to read in every Christian's native language

The small village of Gouabafla, deep in the Ivorian rainforest, is a long way from the council house in Sunderland where I grew up. However, for six years, my wife, Sue, and I along with our two young children lived there in a house without running water or electricity as we worked as translation advisers for the small Kouya church.

The Kouya Christians had decided that they wanted the New Testament in their own language and invited SIL International to work alongside them. For 14 years, a Kouya team worked with expat advisers to develop an alphabet, produce basic reading materials and to translate the New Testament.

For Sue and I, the first task was to learn to communicate in Kouya. This is probably the hardest thing I've ever done: imagine trying to learn a language without books, a curriculum or trained teachers – and for good measure the meaning of a word depends as much on its musical note as the consonants and vowels. As we got to know the Kouya language and people, it became obvious that the people struggled with a linguistic inferiority complex. Years of French colonial influence had left them believing that their own language had no grammar, no literature and little value. It was intensely moving to hear an old man enthuse over one of our early duplicated books of Kouya folk tales: "We are just like the other nations, the French, the Americans, the Germans: they have paper, and now we have our paper".

Finding appropriate Kouya terms for biblical concepts was a fascinating exercise. The local church had adopted a rich vocabulary, which made the job somewhat easier. We were also helped by the fact that, in many ways, Kouya culture is closer to the first-century Middle East than contemporary England. More than once we discovered that customs from biblical times, which made little sense to us, were commonly practised among the Kouya. Then again, complex theological terms such as justification did pose a problem. We would carefully unpack the meaning of the Greek term in a mixture of halting Kouya and French and listen in as our Kouya colleagues debated how best to capture the concept in their language. To read more, click here.