Our First Book Translated into the Cambodian Language

We are thrilled to show everyone our first book translated into Khmer. It will be printed and distributed to Cambodian pastors, church leaders, members, and young couples seeking to understand God's view of marriage. It is also available as a FREE DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCE on the link at the bottom of this post.

I have used the original English version of this material for premarital counseling with dozens of couples. It is study that is grounded in a big view of who God is and what God wants for marriage. Gregory Brown does a fantastic job laying out God's purpose for marriage and what that means for husbands and wives both spiritually and practically. It is one of those books that I continue to learn something new or be convicted in new ways each time I go back through the series.

A little backstory to this project.

We didn't actually start out trying to translate and print any materials. I was counseling a young couple about to be married and we needed it translated to do that well. This turned into a part time job for one of our students. And then we realized - this could be a valuable resource for many Christians in Cambodia - not just those in our community center.

So we decided to pursue printing and distributing this material. We have learned SO MUCH about translating, editing, contextualizing and printing during this 2 year journey. We have had countless people walk beside us along the way guiding or correcting us to make the translation that much better and easy to use for Cambodian people. We are THRILLED to finally have it going to print this next week.

How it will be used.

For our first run we will be printing 350 copies. Out of those 350 books, already 200 are reserved by different ministries wanting to use it for premarital counseling or church leader training. Once we have our new community training center built we hope to host and lead a training seminar to teach lay pastors how to use this material and help guide young couples in their churches.

Not only that but a Cambodian Christian publishing company has graciously put our book on their FREE CAMBODIAN RESOURCE website to give to any missionary or Cambodian Christian that wants access to it. You can check the link out HERE.

Future plans.

One of the unforeseen yet exciting outcomes of this first translation is that we have gotten connected with many people in the translation community both here in Cambodia and back in the States.

For instance we were put in contact with LATM (you can check out there website and ministry HERE). They partnered with us to help fund the printing of this first run of books. They also met with me when I was in the States last year and encouraged us to think about doing more translations. They have been an encouragement to us at every step, but also a great resource to help us see the impact and the larger picture of how to create far reaching translations.

We have started to put together a list of books that we want to translate. We want to use them as systematic discipleship/mentorship tools with Cambodian youth. We also will begin to partner with publishing companies here in Cambodia so we can have guidance with translation and better distribution of materials in Cambodia.

Big Thanks

I want to give a special thanks to Gregory Brown for his amazing study and generously letting us translate it. He has lots of studies you can check out on Amazon under the "Bible Teacher's Guide" series. They are also really good.

We also want to give a big thank you to Layvin, Sovannaro, Bora, Bolong, LATM, and countless others who have helped to make this a reality! We are thrilled and can't wait to see how God uses this material and many others.

To God be the glory.