December 8, 2022

IBT has published a new book in the Abaza language called  Solomon's Wisdom. The Abaza are a people of the Northwestern Caucasus who live primarily in the Karachay-Cherkess  and Stavropol areas of southern Russia. The Abaza language belongs to Abkhaz-Adyghe group of Caucasian languages. It is one of the five official languages of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic. According to the 2010 census, the number of Abaza speakers in Russia is about 38,000.

The new edition is a collection of extracts from two Biblical books – 1 Kings and the book of Proverbs. The epigraph to the collection is the quote, "The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, turning a person from the snares of death" (Proverbs 13:14). It introduces the reader to the central theme of the collection: wisdom. Wisdom belongs to God; it is the moral law of the universe. It is woven into the foundation of things and everything in the world is subject to its laws. Whenever people do good deeds and make good decisions, they live in harmony with wisdom...

Winter 2022-2023 Newsletter on the Kurdish-Kurmanji project

The full Bible in the Kurmanji dialect spoken by Kurds in Armenia and Russia is in the final stages of work, and we at IBT hope that it will be published already in 2024. At this last stage of work, the figure of the philological editor becomes particularly important. This is the translation team’s mother-tongue Kurmanji speaker who improves the translation in terms of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and naturalness, and together with the other team members assesses corrections suggested by reviewers. In the course of the past several decades of work, the IBT/SIL/UBS Kurmanji translation project has had several philological editors, and a highly professional new language specialist joined the team in 2017 – just in time to pull together the work on the full Bible...

Autumn 2022 Newsletter on the Altai project

Synaru, a member of IBT’s Altai translation team, recently visited IBT Moscow office and shared her joy with us: she had just defended her Master’s thesis in theology on the topic of Bible translation into Altai. However, the time to relax and celebrate was very short: Synaru was now facing her next challenge – to revise the Altai NT Epistles so that they would be more easily understood by Altai believers. 

Synaru’s university education was in philology (language and literature studies), and as already mentioned above, her graduate studies were in theology. But what a long path she had to tread to attain her degrees! “I was born in the mountains and grew up in a shepherd’s family,”  she started her story. “Our settlement on the Kazakh-Mongolian border was the most remote village from the capital in Gorno-Altaisk and therefore the furthest from civilization in the entire Republic of Altai...

October 18, 2022

On October 10-14 IBT conducted a webinar for Bible translation teams from IBT and partner organizations on the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. 14 participants from seven Bible translation projects (Avar, Kyrgyz, Tabasaran, Khakass, Tsakhur, Yakut and a North Caucasian project) gathered online for this training event. The webinar was taught by Luka Manevich, a biblical scholar and exegetical adviser in several Scripture translation projects, already familiar to many of the students from his expert instruction at previous webinars.

October 2020

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.