One of my favourite views in my hometown of Macclesfield, UK is this local canal on a bright summer’s day. Almost 200 years ago thousands of labourers toiled to flatten land, build banks and bridges, locks and aqueducts, to make this canal easy to navigate, to enable people to make a journey. Throughout the United Kingdom over 3,500 kilometres of canals and rivers take travellers up and down hills, through mountains and across the countryside.

From my home in Macclesfield I work with the Non-Roman Script Team. We help translators around the world use non-Roman and complex scripts on computers. Publishing the Bible in a complex script requires hundreds of hours of labour: designing fonts, figuring out the character spacing, setting the type nicely, to build a Bible which will be easy to navigate. This helps people who have never been able to read God’s word in their language before to make a journey towards knowing God for themselves. It is challenging but rewarding work to make something clear and accessible, functional yet beautiful – a bit like this canal. Read more about Bible translation in non-Roman scripts.

Photo & Words: Martin Raymond