Ophelia, a team member in IBT’s Lezgi Scripture translation project, recently visited the IBT office in Moscow with her new friend Makhluga, who currently lives in Moscow but grew up in the same village as Ophelia in Azerbaijan. They first became acquainted with each other only three years ago, and Makhluga learned from Ophelia about the translation of the Bible into the Lezgi language.

Makhluga recalled, "This was my first time hearing that something was being translated into the Lezgi language! I was incredibly surprised. Ophelia gave me the Injil (New Testament) in Lezgi. And when IBT produced an audio recording of the Psalms, she sent me Psalm 39 so that I could listen and check how clear the text was. I really liked the way it sounded! I felt that I was ready to sing psalms with her and continue learning more of our language. I had spoken pure Lezgi at home since childhood, but as a child, I didn’t like my mother tongue. Many words sounded crude; they seemed somehow too short. But Ophelia explained to me that our language is very ancient and that such short words have just been preserved from ancient times. 

After school I did some Lezgi philology studies at the local university, but after getting married, I left the university to go to Russia with my husband, and that was the end of my study of my mother tongue. When Ophelia showed me a video of the translation team working, this literally moved me to tears: ‘There are people in Switzerland and in Germany who know the Lezgi language, who have devoted themselves to translating the Bible into my native language, but we Lezgis, including me, have not been all that interested in our language and have not studied it properly.’ I was touched by the fact that a Swiss woman (Dr. Marianne Beerle-Moor, translation consultant for the Lezgi project and former IBT director) began to study Lezgi exactly in the year of my birth, 1979. I felt ashamed that after leaving my university studies, I did not continue to study literary Lezgi."

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