The Institute of Bible Translation (IBT) has published a new edition Injil in the Lak language, including the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the book of Revelation.
The Laks (approximately 173,000 in Russia, according to the 2021 census) are one of the indigenous peoples of the central part of Dagestan, where there are about 60 Lak villages. The Lak language belongs to the Nakh-Dagestan language group. The Laks traditionally practice Islam.
Since the first Lak Scripture portion was published in 1996, the knowledge and skills of the translation team and their ability to translate the Biblical text have improved with each new edition. Many key terms have been clarified, the spelling of proper names has been polished, etc. Now all these books have been revised and printed in a single edition...
In December 2022 a new phase began in the life of the Institute for Bible Translation: Dr. Vitaly Voinov, IBT director since 2013, handed over his directorship to his successor, Bron Cleaver. We interviewed them individually and would like to offer you an insight into this change in the life of IBT.
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...