After IBT published the New Testament in the Tabasaran language of Dagestan in 2010,  the translation team decided to continue their work by translating the Old Testament. Their first Old Testament trial publication (Ruth and Jonah) came out in 2013.  The translators then turned their attention to further OT books, including Esther and Daniel, which were printed in late 2016. Tabasaran is spoken by about 125,000 people and is considered by many linguists to be the record holder among the world’s languages for the number of grammatical cases, 48.

One more book of the Bible has been published by IBT in the Sakha (Yakut) language, a translation of the Proverbs of Solomon. The main Sakha translator and exegete for this IBT project, Sargylana Leontieva was constantly astonished by the interest expressed in these biblical proverbs by non-religious Sakha people who are not in any way involved in the work of Bible translation. “Apparently, it’s because biblical proverbs remind Yakuts of our own folklore with its many proverbial sayings,” she reflects. “The Proverbs contain the kind of wisdom and advice that is vital for all people.”

The PDF version of this Yakut translation may be found on the Electronic Books page of the IBT website. 

The book of Psalms in the Tuvan language was first published in 2005, and a revised version was included in the full Tuvan Bible (2011). The audio version of this book was recorded in summer 2015 in Kyzyl, the capital city of Tuva, and has now been made available on CD and as a free download online.

Two Old Testament books – Psalms and Proverbs – have recently been published in the Kurmanji dialect of the Kurdish language. Kurds speaking this dialect live primarily in Armenia, Georgia, the Central Asian republics, and several regions of the Russian Federation. Literacy in this dialect of Kurdish was introduced in 1946 on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet with additional letters.

Work on translating the Bible into Kurmanji-Kurdish was begun by IBT in 1993. The translation of the New Testament was published in 2000 and was well-received by Kurdish Christians. A revised version of the New Testament (in both Cyrillic script and Roman script) was published in 2011.

A new book has been published in the Lak language of Dagestan. This is the Gospel of Matthew, released together with its audio recording on CD. The PDF version of the book is available for download from the e-book section of IBT website.

The Lak language is spoken by about 146,000 native speakers.The historical center of Lak society is in the town of Kumukh in the highlands of Dagestan, but today most Laks live in the city of Makhachkala near the Caspian Sea and other lowland parts of Dagestan and Russia...