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.

From 14 to 17 February 2017 IBT held in its office a workshop for 18 participants from 10 translation projects (Abaza, Avar, Altai, Balkar, Chukchi, Dargi, Rutul, Siberian Tatar, Tsakhur, and for the first time Russian Sign language).

How does one translate culture-specific elements found in ancient Israelite society into languages in which these concepts do not exist? How can these concepts be transferred into the new cultural context of the recipient language and how much adaptation is permissible?  These  questions, the focus of much scholarly discussion in contemporary Biblical studies, were the focus of IBT’s recent seminar for Bible translation teams  on “Bridging the Cultural Gap Between the World of the Bible and the Languages of Russia/CIS”, held outside Moscow in late October.

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.

In January 2015 two translation team members from IBT's Avar and Ingush projects traveled to the Holy Land for a 10-day study tour focusing on the historical, geographical and cultural contexts in which the Bible was written. This tour was arranged by the Home for Bible Translators, an organization that for the past two decades has been providing high quality educational programs for Bible translators from around the world to increase their level of expertise in translating the Holy Scriptures...