IBT has published the translation of the Old Testament book of Job in Kumyk, a Turkic language spoken by more than 400,000 people, primarily in the Dagestan region of southern Russia.
The book of Job has a special place both in the Bible and among the masterpieces of world literature, offering deep theological reflection on why suffering afflicts even good people in this life. It is one of the most difficult books of the Bible to translate due to numerous difficulties having to do with rare words and ambiguous expressions in the Hebrew original. This is the first time that IBT has published the book of Job by itself in any of our projects. The Hebrew poetic form of the central portion of the book was rendered as poetry in Kumyk, and footnotes deal with translation issues that were difficult to get across in the text...
At translation workshops, many translation teams gather together to work on a practical task and exchange their experience with their instructors and with one another. The entire process resembles a massive brainstorm session. The intensity of the work gives birth to new translation decisions and sometimes even to completely new approaches to translation.
