After finishing the writing of the Sunday school quarterly, I immediately began to work on my next project. For the past year now, as I have been able to devote time to it, I have been working on the translation of Dr. Jack Cottrell’s systematic theology, The Faith Once For All. This is a very large and thorough work that covers nearly every aspect of the church and Christian life. It is a book that should prove invaluable as Dr. Cottrell’s careful scholarship and abundant Biblical foundations will help us teach and train the preachers and local Christians here in Colombia. We expect the book will be of significant values and so widely used throughout all of Latin America.
That is the reason why for the last year now, I have taken nearly every moment I can spare from the ministry to dedicate myself to this translation. The work is slow and tedious. I must be very careful that I understand Dr. Cottrell’s arguments and even his grammatical constructs so that I can do a very precise translation. As always, I must translate ideas and not words, so that is why I must be very careful to understand precisely his work so I can do it justice in the Spanish language.
As a rule, I can translate between three and four pages a day if I put in eight to ten hours of work. Some of the sections that are much deeper may require a full day to do one or two pages. Each chapter has about 20 pages, so it generally takes me between one and two weeks to do each chapter. There are thirty three chapters in the book and I have agreed to do from chapter sixteen to chapter thirty three. Missionaries in Chile are doing chapters one through fifteen. I am currently working on chapter thirty and the missionaries in Chile have informed me that their section is now complete.
That means that if all goes well, I should be able to finish up the translation by the end of this month. After that we trade sections and I will read over and critique the section done in Chile. Once they have gone over my work and I have checked their work, we can move the book into the layout and publication phase. We are hoping to have this book printed and available by the end of the year. This has been a massive but very important task. We are now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and hopefully, I can finish up and get back to other important jobs I have waiting for me down here.