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Summer 2023 Newsletter on a Caucasian project

“This was our toughest consultant checking session yet!” confessed Vitaly, IBT’s former director and still a consultant for a North Caucasian Scripture translation project which for safety reasons we were asked not to name. Let’s simply call it “the T-language”. Vitaly then shared some of the difficulties in the checking session and how most of them were overcome, leaving behind a sense of joy for a job well done by all the translation team members...
 

June 20, 2023

The Institute for Bible Translation (IBT), in partnership with  the  Bible Society in Russia (BSR), SIL International and the United Bible Societies, recently published the complete Bible in the Bashkir language, titled (in translation from Bashkir) “Holy Scripture (Taurat, Zebur, Injil)”.

The full canonical Bible has by now been translated into about 728 languages (about 10% of the 7000 or so languages spoken in the world today). Bashkir, the fourth-largest language in the Russian Federation by number of speakers (approximately 1.3 million), is one of the official languages of the Republic of Bashkortostan in central Russia. It too has now joined the ranks of languages with a complete translation of the Bible, the Book of Books, the most translated text in the world...

May 22, 2023

The Institute for Bible Translation (IBT) has printed the first translation of the Pentateuch into the Lezgi language. Prior Scripture publications in Lezgi include: Excerpts from Matthew (1990); Mark (1996); Luke/Acts  (2004); the Children’s Bible (2009); Ruth/Esther/ Jonah (2010); the Four Gospels (2014); and the New Testament (2018).

The Lezgi language belongs to the Lezgic group of the Nakh-Dagestanian family of Caucasian languages. It is spoken by more than 700,000 people in southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan.

The translation work was carried out by a highly qualified IBT team that includes experts in the Lezgi language, as well as exegetes and Bible scholars. The translation was tested with native speakers and reviewed at the Tsadasa Institute of Language, Literature and Art in Dagestan...