The Institute for Bible Translation (IBT) and the Bible Society in Russia (BSR) have published the result of their joint work - the first-ever complete translation of the Bible into the Buryat language. The book was published with the stamp of approval of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The Buryat Bible is the 10th full Bible in the languages of the indigenous peoples of Russia, coming after the translations into Russian, Chuvash, Tuvan, Chechen, Udmurt, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, Ossetic and Bashkir. The Buryat language, whose speakers number about 307,000, is now among the 10% or so of the world’s languages that have a complete translation of the Holy Scriptures. Currently, the Bible has been fully translated into 757 of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world.
The Buryat Bible translation project was started in 1975 by IBT with a reprint of the Buryat editions of the Gospel of Matthew (1909) and Mark (1912), originally published by the Irkutsk Committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society. In the early 1990s, IBT began work on a new translation of New Testament into the modern Buryat literary language. Several well-known Buryat writers and philologists were involved in the work, including: Professor Tsyrendashi Budaev; poet Gunga Chimitov; and poetess and translation theory specialist Darima Raitsanova. Editors included Rinchin Dylykova, Elizaveta Baldanmaksarova, and others.
Over the past several decades IBT’s Buryat project saw the translation and publication of: the Gospel of Mark (1996); the Gospel of John (1998, 2003); “Jesus - Friend of Children” (1999); the Children’s Bible (2004); the New Testament (2010); and “Stories about Jesus Christ” with audio recording on CD (2012).
In parallel with IBT’s work on New Testament translation, the Bible Society in Russia began a project to translate the Old Testament in 2002. This work was carried out by a group of well-known Buryat linguists, writers and translators: Larisa Badmaeva; Irina Gomboin; Chingis Gomboin; Garma-Dodi Dambaev; Munko-Zhargal Ochirov; Dalai Khubituev, as well as editors Mikhail Batoin, Sayana Dabaeva, Galina Ochirova, Tsytsygma Balzhinimayeva, and others. In 2010, the first book of the Old Testament, the book of Genesis, was published in the modern Buryat language.
In preparing for printing the complete text of the Bible in Buryat, all previously translated texts of the Old and New Testament were checked and revised by the joint efforts of the BSR and IBT translation teams. Specialists in biblical theology, Hebrew, Greek, and Buryat strove to achieve a close correspondence of the translation to the meaning of the original and at the same time to provide the reader with an understandable and natural text corresponding to the literary norms of the Buryat language. The project to combine the two Testaments was carried out with the participation of exegetical editor Luka Manevich and translation consultant Dr. Lenart de Regt (United Bible Societies).
The publishers of the Buryat Bible translation hope that this book will find grateful and interested readers, serve to enrich their spirituality, contribute to the development of the language and culture of the Buryat people, and promote beneficial interreligious dialogue in the Republic of Buryatia and beyond.