The Institute for Bible Translation has published a new edition of the Gospel of Luke in Bashkir, a Turkic language spoken in central Russia. Distribution of the 1,000 copy print-run has already begun among the Bashkir people.
The first edition of Bashkir Luke was published in 1996.  The text used for the 2^nd edition is the one that was published in the Bashkir New Testament in 2015.  Other past publications include the Gospel of John (2000) and the Gospel of Mark (2003).  All of these printings are long gone, and IBT has received numerous reprint requests from churches in Bashkortstan and the Moscow area, which took an active part in funding the current edition of Luke.

IBT’s diglot Turkmen/Russian edition of the book of Proverbs has been presented to the Russian Orthodox church in Ashgabat, the capital city of Turkmenistan, by Archbishop Theophylact during his visit to Ashgabat on June 16. This edition of the book of Proverbs was prepared by IBT in close coordination with the Russian Orthodox Church. The book will be distributed for free in Orthodox churches in Turkmenistan to people who are interested in studying the Russian language by means of this publication.

IBT has published and officially presented the first-ever translation of the full Bible in Uzbek. This Turkic language is spoken by up to 30 million people worldwide, primarily in the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan. Uzbek now joins about 600 other languages that have a full translation of the canonical Holy Scriptures (less than 10% of the world’s total languages.)
The official Bible presentation was held by BSU and IBT in Tashkent on June 1, 2017 at the headquarters of the Tashkent diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. The presentation was attended by representatives of Uzbekistan’s Committee of Religious Affairs, the Russian Orthodox Church, the embassies of Russia and the United States, the United Bible Societies (including the Bible societies of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), the Islamic University of Tashkent, and leaders of various Christian confessions.

There are about 120,000 speakers of the Adyghe language, most of whom live in the Republic of Adyghea in the northwest Caucasus region of the Russian Federation.

From 2002 to 2015 IBT published 11 Old Testament books in Adyghe:  1-2 Samuel (2002), Genesis (2005),  Ruth, Esther and Jonah (2006), Psalms (2007), 1-2 Kings (2009), Exodus (2014), and Proverbs (2014, 2016). The New Testament was published in the early 1990s. Now the book of Daniel has also been published.

IBT held a translator training seminar April 26-28 at the Tsadasa Institute of Language, Literature and the Arts in the city of Makhachkala in Dagestan. The seminar was devoted to practical language issues encountered by Bible translators. The fifteen seminar participants (primarily translators or philological editors in IBT’s translation projects) represented seven languages of the North Caucasus –  Avar, Balkar, Bezhta, Dargi, Kumyk, Lak and Tabasaran.