Benito Fernandez and the Translation of a Lifetime
For ten years, Benito’s voice traveled across the mountains and valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. As a bilingual Mazatec-Spanish broadcaster at a government-run cultural radio station, he spoke to his people in their language on a daily basis. He didn’t know it then, but God was preparing Benito during that decade at the microphone for something far greater than radio.
A Language Loved Before It Was Written
Benito grew up in San Pedro Ixcatlán, a Mazatec-speaking community in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. At eleven years old, he was sent away from home to attend an indigenous boarding school in the nearby city of Tuxtepec. For three years he lived there without a single visit from family. It was a lonely stretch of childhood, but it planted something important in him.
At school, students studied their indigenous language as a formal subject, writing it down as best they could despite the absence of an official alphabet. For Benito, the experience was quietly transformative. “In that institution I learned to value my language more,” he reflects. Writing Mazatec became a goal that stayed with him long after he left.
On the Air
On November 20, 1991, Benito began his career at a government radio station and entered a world that would shape him in ways he couldn’t yet see. The training covered voice projection and announcing, journalism, anthropology, and history. His job was to present the news in the Mazatec language.
Over time, the work deepened. Benito attended festivals and ceremonies, reported on community events, and hosted special programs featuring commentary and regional music. He began writing about the history of local communities, especially his own. By the year 2000, he had earned his broadcaster’s certificate from Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education. His role by then was to translate and interpret the full life of the region into the Mazatec language.
The fruit of those years extended beyond the airwaves. Benito published a book called San Pedro Ixcatlán: A Town of Customs, capturing his community’s history, traditions, and the development of the Mazatec language itself. “From that point on,” he says simply, “God began preparing me.”
He reflects on those years with a clarity that only comes in hindsight: “God is the one who does or prepares everything. I simply let myself be guided by Him, even though at that time I didn’t even know Him. But He already knew me.”
The Word That Changed Everything
Faith came to Benito later in life, and it came through a conversation. A pastor from Puebla arrived in San Pedro Ixcatlán during a difficult season in Benito’s marriage and asked if he could speak with the family. What began as a brief visit became a turning point. Benito and his wife Juana accepted Christ together and began attending a local church. It was there, hearing his community struggle with Spanish-language Scripture, that the next calling took shape.
“It was evident that our people needed the translation of the word of God,” he says, “because I realized that many of them did not understand the texts of the Bible well.” The Mazatec language is tonal, meaning a single word can carry entirely different meanings depending on pitch. Reading it is its own skill. Hearing it in your heart language is something else entirely.
Benito joined the Mazatec New Testament translation team in 2005. One by one, teammates left until he was the only one remaining. He finished the project alone, and the completed New Testament was presented to the community on February 22, 2014. It was, in its own way, a broadcast of the best news his language had ever carried.
Broadcasting Principles, Translation Precision
Today, Benito serves as translator and project coordinator for the Mazatec Old Testament translation in San Pedro Ixcatlán, where he also assists two additional projects: the Chinantec translation in San Lucas Ojitlán and a Mazatec project in San Miguel Soyaltepec. Through a Seed Company internship with the Mexico Bible Society, he is training toward full accreditation as a translation consultant.
The skills he honed at the radio station show up in his work in ways that are hard to manufacture in a classroom. A broadcaster learns to communicate clearly across differences, to read an audience, to judge whether a message is landing. A translator has to do the same thing, asking constantly: is this how my people actually speak? Does this phrase carry what the original text intends, in a voice the community will receive?
That instinct is producing results. His supervisor recently noted that the Ixcatlán Mazatec team is conducting deep exegetical work and achieving such naturalness in the language that consultant revisions have become minimal. The translation sounds like them.
The work is close to completion now, and Benito speaks about the final stretch with the precision of someone who knows exactly how much still remains. “Just when we think we’re done,” he says, “we need to check text formatting, long dialogue scripts, quotation marks, and many markers.” After the Old Testament is finished, the team will revise the New Testament to harmonize the two before printing. The finish line is in sight, but the final miles demand the same care as the first.
What the Word Is Doing
The translation isn’t just a text. It’s already changing lives. Benito describes young people in San Pedro Ixcatlán who were involved in drugs and illegal activities, whose lives have been transformed by the Word of God reaching them in their own language. “God has revealed Himself through His Word,” he says, “especially in the lives of some people, particularly young people, who had problems with drugs. God has transformed their lives.” He continues to hold that up as the reason the work matters: so that others, too, may be saved through Christ.
In his prayer requests, Benito carries both the work and the people it serves. He asks for wisdom to do the best possible translation, for protection over families who sacrifice time together for the sake of the project, and for God’s continued work among the young people of his community. “For us,” he says, “the priority is the Lord’s work, and we know clearly that He knows what He is doing.”
It turns out the radio broadcaster never stopped broadcasting. He just found a message worth a lifetime.
Benito Fernandez Figueroa serves in the Seed Company Global Translation Leadership program with the Mexico Bible Society, working to bring Scripture to the Mazatec community of San Pedro Ixcatlán. Learn more about this program and other leaders around the globe at https://seedcompany.com/global-translation-leaders/.
