IBT is happy to announce the release of a bilingual edition of Ecclesiastes in Adyghe and Kabardian, closely-related languages of the North Caucasus in the Russian Federation.
First, a little history. The official classification of Adyghe and Kabardian as separate languages appeared in 1922, when the Adyghe (Cherkess) and Karachay-Cherkess autonomous regions were formed inside the USSR. Until that time, the two languages were considered to be dialects of a single Circassian language. Over the past century, Adyghe and Kabardian have each developed independently (especially in their written forms), but some speakers of Adyghe and Kabardian still feel that they belong to the same language community. The Ecclesiastes publication was born out of a desire to preserve and develop the community between these two peoples.
During the covid-19 quarantine, it was impossible to hold in-person training seminars, so IBT’s planned seminar on translating two of the Minor Prophets was conducted as a webinar. The texts of Habakkuk and Malachi make up only a small part of the full Bible, only 7 chapters in all. Let us mentally project ourselves into this webinar. Specifically, you and I are taking part in a discussion focused on an even smaller fragment – a single Biblical verse, Malachi 2:2. We see this text through a Zoom-conference window. The selected verse is not particularly difficult exegetically. But it turns out to be quite complex in terms of different perceptions of the same concepts held by different cultures.