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April 27, 2015

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.

April 16, 2015

In mid-April, two IBT staff members attended the EMDC conference in Holland. EMDC (Eurasia Media & Distribution Consultation) is an annual forum, meeting alternately in Asia and Europe, at which minority language workers can meet with electronic media specialists and technicians, recording specialists, graphic artists, digital publishers and specialists in orality and ethno-arts. This year's EMDC hosted 380 participants from 130 organizations in 61 countries.

The latest New Testament to be published by IBT is in Bashkir, a Turkic language spoken by more than 1 million people in central Russia. IBT began work on this first-ever translation of the full New Testament into Bashkir in the mid-1990s with a view towards producing a clear, accurate and natural text. Positive scholarly reviews of the translated text by the Institute of History, Language and Literature in Ufa, the capital city of Bashkortostan, testify to the fact that this goal has been achieved.

March 11, 2015

IBT is continuing to make progress towards the goal of translating and publishing the Old Testament in the Adyghe language, spoken by about 120,000 people in the Northwest Caucasus in south Russia and many more in the diaspora. The latest trial publication is the book of Exodus, delivered to Adyghea in late February.

March 5, 2015

IBT staff in Moscow recently completed an almost month-long project to finish the audio recording of the New Testament in the Khakas language of south Siberia. The Gospels were recorded in Khakas in 2008. The full NT was published only in 2009, and this was the first opportunity to complete the recording of Acts through Revelation.