The Institute for Bible Translation has recently published the book of Ecclesiastes in the Gagauz language. Gagauz belongs to the Oghuz subgroup of Turkic languages and is spoken by about 180,000 people living mainly in the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia within the Republic of Moldova, where it is one of the official languages along with Moldovan and Russian.

This is the first-ever translation of Ecclesiastes into Gagauz. The translation team included translator Petri Çebotari (Gagauz writer, scholar and compiler of the Gagauz-Russian-Romanian dictionary) and philological editor Dr. Ivanna Bankova. The project also involved biblical scholars who carefully checked the translation against the original Hebrew text and testers who ensured that it was understood by different groups of readers.

In the process of translating Ecclesiastes, the translation team aimed to preserve its poetic features, such as parallelism. At the same time, they tried to make the translation as understandable as possible for the Gagauz reader without straying from the meaning of the original Hebrew. Some words and expressions that are difficult to understand are explained in footnotes.

The Gagauz writing system was switched from Cyrillic to Roman/Latin script in the 1990s, so the older generation prefers to use the Cyrillic alphabet. This is why the present text and other recent IBT publications in Gagauz are presented in two scripts: the text is in Cyrillic script on the left-hand page and in Roman script on the right.

Among the editions previously published by IBT in the Gagauz language are: the New Testament (2006); the Children’s Bible (2010); the Liturgical Six Psalms (2011); Ruth and Jonah (2017); and Genesis (2021).

The new book will soon also be available as an electronic edition on IBT’s website, as well as in an Android app.