 Akʼabʼal originally began writing his poetry in Spanish, "because he was 'illiterate' in his own mother tongue," but eventually started to write in Kʼicheʼ in the 1980s.Despite the fact that his own Spanish translations made his works available to a wider audience, Akʼabʼal was unable to find a publisher interested in printing his Kʼicheʼ work until 1993.Since gaining popularity, Akʼabʼal's poetry has been translated into many different languages, including French, English, Estonian, Scots, German, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Arabic, and Italian.