IBT continues to publish translations of Proverbs, a book of wisdom from the Old Testament, in various languages of Russia and the CIS. The most recent edition of this book has recently come out in the Nogai language.

The Nogai are a Turkic people group that resides in Dagestan, Stavropol region, Karachay-Cherkessia, Chechnya, and Astrakhan oblast. The group numbers around 103,600 people. Nogai belongs to the Turkic language family.

How does one translate in such a way that the information relevant in one culture at a certain time would be communicated with the same relevance in a different culture at a different time? What does one need to be mindful of in order to impact a contemporary audience in the same way that the original audience was impacted? What Biblical materials are relevant for a particular audience?

A presentation of IBT’s latest scholarly edition, The Pauline Epistles: Texts and Commentary, was held on September 26.  IBT co-published this edition with publishing house “Granat”, which organized the presentation at a cultural center in Moscow.

IBT and its partner organization in Azerbaijan, “Kitab”, have published a new edition of IBT’s popular illustrated Children’s Bible (CB) in the Azeri language. Previously, IBT and Kitab had cooperated on the translation of the full Azeri Bible, which Kitab published in 2009. The Azeri title of the new CB literally means “Pearls from Holy Scripture.” 3,000 copies of this edition were printed in Baku this summer and the book is now being distributed among Azeri readers.

IBT has published the second edition of the Altai New Testament, fourteen years after the first edition was released (2003). Altai is a Turkic language spoken by about 57,000 people primarily in south Siberia. In response to requests from readers over the past decade, this edition remains a meaning-based translation and has been thoroughly edited to replace many archaic expressions and to simplify overly complex “Biblical style,” thereby achieving greater naturalness and clarity.