The 1st edition of the Tuvan Bible was highly appreciated by reviewers and the Tuvan public. However, it was recently decided to start a Bible revision project at a meeting of the translation team with Tuvan church representatives. Why is this necessary? The Tuvan project exegete, IBT’s director Vitaly Voinov answers this question:
“Whatver a human being can produce is never perfect. Even if you are highly professional in what you do, there is always the chance that time and a new perspective will show you what could be improved. Moreover, language and culture are never static, so translation too needs to keep up with ongoing developments. As the ancient Greeks used to say, πάντα ρεῖ – ‘everything flows’ – including language and culture. And we as Bible translators need to accept this and adapt to it. Many Bible scholars believe that ideally every generation should have its own Bible translation.”
Nina, a field tester in the Kalmyk Bible translation project, is one of the earliest local workers to get involved in IBT activities in Russia. She started her work with IBT in 1992 and has continued to the present day. When I asked her how she began working on Bible translation and whether she was chosen for this task because she was a language scholar or a Christian believer, she at first could not answer my question. It seemed that the exact reason was still a mystery to Nina herself. We started unravelling the tangle of that period of her life together.
These words were pronounced in connection with a study tour to Israel of a group of IBT translators several years ago. This thought was expressed by our Kabardian translator and summarize his experience of the trip: “No doubt, that tour was one of the greatest in my life. We got an opportunity to see all the places mentioned in the historical books of the Bible. What a magnificent experience it was!
As I looked through the Tabasaran-Russian dictionary developed by Selina (a pseudonym), a Tabasaran linguist, a thought flashed through mind: “It must feel odd you to pray to God in Russian, where the word ad ‘hell’ sounds the same as the word ad ‘glory’ in your mother tongue.” Selina is the field-tester and local co-ordinator in IBT’s Tabasaran Bible translation project, and I also knew that she is a Christian believer. However, when I voiced my guess that she probably uses Tabasaran, and not Russian, in her church, she laughed merrily at my total ignorance. “Do you really think that there are so many Christians among my people that we could have opened a Tabasaran church?” she shrugged. “There are just two Christians on our translation team: the translator and myself. The rest of the team members are Muslims, as are the absolute majority of Tabasarans. Of course we have to attend a Russian-language church.”
IBT has published a special English-language book dedicated to its silver anniversary of being a fullfledged Russian organization. The present volume is a compilation of IBT newsletters dealing with our various Bible translation projects, written by IBT staff member Tanya Prokhorova over the course of the past decade based on her interviews with project workers. The golden thread that runs through all of these newsletters is Tanya’s focus on the human face of IBT. It is not only about producing a good translation of the Bible into many languages (although this is undoubtedly a key part of the process), but about serving people – many people, different people, from a large variety of backgrounds, who happen to speak many different languages. In other words, the final goal of our work is human-centric, not book-centric. And this translation work is not only done for people, but by people – once again, many people, different people, from a large variety of backgrounds.
The 1st edition of the Tuvan Bible was highly appreciated by reviewers and the Tuvan public. However, it was recently decided to start a Bible revision project at a meeting of the translation team with Tuvan church representatives. Why is this necessary? The Tuvan project exegete, IBT’s director Vitaly Voinov answers this question:
Nina, a field tester in the Kalmyk Bible translation project, is one of the earliest local workers to get involved in IBT activities in Russia. She started her work with IBT in 1992 and has continued to the present day. When I asked her how she began working on Bible translation and whether she was chosen for this task because she was a language scholar or a Christian believer, she at first could not answer my question. It seemed that the exact reason was still a mystery to Nina herself. We started unravelling the tangle of that period of her life together.
These words were pronounced in connection with a study tour to Israel of a group of IBT translators several years ago. This thought was expressed by our Kabardian translator and summarize his experience of the trip: “No doubt, that tour was one of the greatest in my life. We got an opportunity to see all the places mentioned in the historical books of the Bible. What a magnificent experience it was!
