Damira (name changed) is the Siberian Tatar woman who lends her voice for audio recording IBT’s translations. For Damira, reading Bible texts in Siberian Tatar is like solving an equation with multiple unknown variables. The first thing is that she has never held a Bible in her hands before. The second is that before participating in this project, she didn’t know the alphabet of her mother tongue, like the vast majority of Siberian Tatars. And with this initial state of affairs, she had to learn to read Scripture in Siberian Tatar effortlessly, at a good pace, so that her audio recording would sound natural...

“Buryat culture has two main colours in our tradition,” said IBT’s Buryat translator Darima, whom I interviewed on the eve of the publication of the full Bible in the Buryat language. “These are turquoise-blue, the colour of the turquoise stone, and red, the colour of coral. This is true even about clothes: turquoise and coral-coloured clothes suit me best. When the Buryats adopted Buddhism, the orange/saffron colour also appeared in our culture. Red is the colour of internal revolution, the transformation of the mind. As for turquoise, this is the colour of the blue sky and our blue Lake Baikal...