Undefined
July 1, 2014

The book of Proverbs has recently been audio recorded by IBT in the endangered Bezhta and Tsakhur languages. Bezhta is spoken by about 6,000 people in Dagestan and does not have an official orthography, while Tsakhur has about 23,000 speakers in Dagestan and Azerbaijan and is written with both Cyrillic and Roman orthographies. While both languages have a rich oral tradition, neither yet has a tradition of written literature.

May 21, 2014

On 21 May, the Russian Orthodox bishop of Yakutia met with IBT staff at the IBT office in St. Andrew's Monastery in order to discuss further cooperation on Bible translation work into the Yakut (Sakha) language. Bishop Roman expressed gratitude to IBT for publishing a revised version of the colorful Children's Bible in Yakut in 2013.

April 4, 2014

On April 1-3, IBT and SIL conducted a joint workshop outside Moscow geared towards helping Bible translation teams think through and write up a so-called "translation brief" for their projects. Workshop participants dealt with issues foundational to any translation project, such as: the specific short-term and long-term goals of the project, the intended audience, this audience's perspective on the Bible in light of its own religious and cultural setting, the roles of translation team members, and desired formats for publishing and distributing the Bible translation (such as printed books, audio recordings, electronic publications, etc.).

March 6, 2014

IBT has recently published the Four Gospels in the Lezgi language. There are over 400,000 Lezgi speakers in the Russian Federation, most of whom live in south Dagestan near the border with Azerbaijan. More than 350,000 Lezgis also live in Azerbaijan, as well as in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

February 26, 2014

On 25 February, 2014, Fr. Cosmas Shartz, an Orthodox monk from the Monastery of St. John of San Francisco (Manton, CA), gave a talk to the IBT staff and assembled guests. Fr. Cosmas shared his experience of working in the late 1990s and early 2000s to produce the English-language Orthodox Study Bible. The full title of this publication is The Orthodox Study Bible: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today's World.