The first international conference on “The Role of Religion in the Turkic Culture” (Budapest, 9-11 September) gathered scholars from around the world to exchange papers about the interaction of religion and society among the Turkic peoples of Eurasia, both past and present.  Presentations dealt with issues relevant to the religions that have been espoused at one time or another by various Turkic peoples -- Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Tengrianism and Manicheism .

In early June, IBT held a seminar in Moscow on what is known in Bible translation circles as Scripture Engagement. The seminar was attended by 21 people from 11 different ethnic groups of Russia and the CIS into whose language IBT has already translated significant portions of the Bible.  Many of the participants were not IBT translation team staff, but rather members of churches that are using IBT’s Scripture translations.

IBT has published a new book containing the first-ever translation of the Old Testament books of Jonah, Ruth and Esther in the Ingush language of the North Caucasus. Ingush is spoken as a mother tongue by more than 300,000 people in the Russian Republic of Ingushetia, with a total of about a half million ethnic Ingush in the entire Russian Federation. It is closely related to the neighboring Chechen language.

IBT has released an audio recording of the book of Proverbs in the Kumyk language. The Kumyks are the largest Turkic people in the northern Caucasus region of Russia, with approximately 432,000 living in Dagestan and another 70,000 or so in other parts of Russia.

IBT has published the book of Proverbs in Dungan, a language closely related to Mandarin Chinese with influence from Arabic, Persian, Russian, Kyrgyz and other languages. About 110,000 Dungans live in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with up to 10 million more in China. While Dungans in China use the standard Chinese writing system, since the 1920s Dungans in Central Asia have used a separate orthography, which was converted to Cyrillic letters in the early 1950s.