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...

The twin-peaked Mount Elbrus is located right on the border of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Many well-known legends and myths have been reinterpreted by the local peoples and connected with their native lands and this enormous mountain: it was here that the Argonauts searched for the golden fleece, and Prometheus, who gave fire to mankind, was also chained to a cliff on Mt. Elbrus. The Abaza people see Mount Elbrus in the biblical story of the Flood. According to one of their legends, Noah's ark should have stopped on Elbrus. Noah addressed the mountain: “Please stop the ark, let it abide on your top!” But the mountain refused Noah, so the Lord punished it by splitting its top in two, and the ark eventually stopped on Mt. Ararat...

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.