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. The lecturers were Yevgeniy Shved (exegetical advisor of the Crimean Tatar project and consultant-in-training) and Vitaly Voinov (IBT director and translation consultant).

Specific topics covered include: Textual cohesion and coherence, Pragmatic considerations when dealing with archaic, Syntactic restructuring for greater naturalness, Discourse analysis of one’s mother tongue, Identifying new and old information, foreground and background, Focus position as signaled by word order, etc.

Each lecture was followed by a practical assignment analyzing Russian and mother-tongue texts, and discussion of problems and potential solutions.