In Egypt, everyone learns to read and write in classical Arabic, however, for more than a hundred million people, classical Arabic is not their mother tongue. The heart language for most is Egyptian Arabic which differs significantly. No Bible translation in Egyptian Arabic exists in a textual format.

This great need led me to join a team to translate the Bible into Egyptian Arabic. Since I started working with this team in 2019, we have completed translations for the entire New Testament as well as several Old Testament books, and we continue to work on translating the rest of the Old Testament.

The more I gave time to translation work, the more I felt that I needed to be equipped academically to gain insight into the field and task of translation. This led me to enroll in a Master of Arts in Linguistics at the Canada Institute of Linguistics (CanIL), which is a key training body for Bible translators and language analysts.

Since my studies began, I have realized that there is an immense body of knowledge in the form of tools, research and best practices in the realm of Bible translation that would be of great benefit to our team in bringing our project to completion.

My specific purpose for undertaking these studies is to research how Egyptian orthography can be standardized. The more I take linguistics courses, the more I realize how crucial it is to develop an orthography based on the science of communication.

Not only have I gained insight into the area of language analysis, I have also learned how to make the translation more accurate and faithful to the meaning of the texts – this is extremely important. The studies I'm facilitating are the "behind the scenes" work.

Even after only one semester of a two-year program, I can already see how embarking on this program has been of great benefit to our Bible translation project to give people access to God’s word in this heart language.

The essence of this whole project speaks volumes to the Muslim world as we are involved in putting the Holy Word of God into day-to-day language, communicating how personal and relatable our God is to the people of Egypt.

Having a quality translation that is done professionally, ensures that whole passages are rightly structured to ensure an accurate meaning.

The project team’s goal is to give the reader access to the Scriptures – the very words of life spoken by our God who has communicated who He is and His purposes from creation to new creation.