IBT has released an audio recording of the book of Proverbs in the Kumyk language. The Kumyks are the largest Turkic people in the northern Caucasus region of Russia, with approximately 432,000 living in Dagestan and another 70,000 or so in other parts of Russia.

IBT has published the book of Proverbs in Dungan, a language closely related to Mandarin Chinese with influence from Arabic, Persian, Russian, Kyrgyz and other languages. About 110,000 Dungans live in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with up to 10 million more in China. While Dungans in China use the standard Chinese writing system, since the 1920s Dungans in Central Asia have used a separate orthography, which was converted to Cyrillic letters in the early 1950s.

In mid-April, two IBT staff members attended the EMDC conference in Holland. EMDC (Eurasia Media & Distribution Consultation) is an annual forum, meeting alternately in Asia and Europe, at which minority language workers can meet with electronic media specialists and technicians, recording specialists, graphic artists, digital publishers and specialists in orality and ethno-arts. This year's EMDC hosted 380 participants from 130 organizations in 61 countries.

The latest New Testament to be published by IBT is in Bashkir, a Turkic language spoken by more than 1 million people in central Russia. IBT began work on this first-ever translation of the full New Testament into Bashkir in the mid-1990s with a view towards producing a clear, accurate and natural text. Positive scholarly reviews of the translated text by the Institute of History, Language and Literature in Ufa, the capital city of Bashkortostan, testify to the fact that this goal has been achieved.

IBT is continuing to make progress towards the goal of translating and publishing the Old Testament in the Adyghe language, spoken by about 120,000 people in the Northwest Caucasus in south Russia and many more in the diaspora. The latest trial publication is the book of Exodus, delivered to Adyghea in late February.

IBT staff in Moscow recently completed an almost month-long project to finish the audio recording of the New Testament in the Khakas language of south Siberia. The Gospels were recorded in Khakas in 2008. The full NT was published only in 2009, and this was the first opportunity to complete the recording of Acts through Revelation.

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...

At the beginning of February IBT held a seminar in our office in Moscow for the purpose of introducing IBT's work to new workers and potential future workers. Participants came from various parts of Russia, including Altai, Yakutia, the Nenets Autonomous Region and the Northern Caucasus. Over the course of several days, seminar participants were introduced to topics that are important for translation team members to know well in their work with IBT: the structure and history of the Old and New Testaments, the historical and cultural context of the Bible, exegesis, translation theory, linguistic analysis, field testing, etc...

On 30 January 2015, the Institute for Bible Translation in Russia/CIS celebrated the 20^th anniversary of our official registration as a bona fide Russian organization. Since 1995, IBT staff and our partners in other Bible translation organizations have been working on translating Holy Scripture into more than 60 languages in the former USSR.

At the end of 2014, IBT published the Nenets translation of the Gospel of John. The Nenets are an indigenous people of the far north of Russia on the Arctic Ocean who number about 45,000 and speak a Samoyedic language. John's Gospel was originally intended to be published as part of the upcoming Nenets edition of the Four Gospels. However, at the Festival of Northern Peoples in March 2014, our translators received many requests for its earlier publication , and local believers began collecting funds to publish it as a separate edition...