The Institute for Bible Translation has published a beautifully illustrated selection of four parables from the Gospel of Luke in the Dungan language. The selection includes the Parables of the Good Samaritan (10:30-35), the Wedding Feast (14:16-23), the Prodigal Son (15:11-32), and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (18:10-14), and comes with an audio recording of the text on CD.

Working in coordination with the Bible Society of Kyrgyzstan and the Orthodox Diocese of Kyrgyzstan, IBT has produced the Kyrgyz translation of  the Six Psalms (Hexapsalmos) that are used in the Orthodox church service. In mid-December, IBT’s deputy director Marina Lomova presented the diocese with 200 copies of this translation, which was printed in Bishkek by Al-Salam Publishing House.

How does one translate culture-specific elements found in ancient Israelite society into languages in which these concepts do not exist? How can these concepts be transferred into the new cultural context of the recipient language and how much adaptation is permissible?  These  questions, the focus of much scholarly discussion in contemporary Biblical studies, were the focus of IBT’s recent seminar for Bible translation teams  on “Bridging the Cultural Gap Between the World of the Bible and the Languages of Russia/CIS”, held outside Moscow in late October.

IBT has recently published an illustrated edition of “Bible Stories” in the Dungan language, spoken primarily in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and China. This book is a short version of IBT’s beloved Children’s Bible that introduces readers to 58 stories from the Old and New Testament.

The 8^th biennial international conference on Bible translation sponsored by the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL) and SIL International was held in Dallas, Texas on October 16-20.  This year’s event was attended by over 450 participants from more than 35 Bible agencies around the world.

IBT has already had a significant amount of experience translating the Scriptures into languages with no writing system of their own or with a writing system that was only recently created for the language.  For example, IBT published the Gospel of Luke and the book of Proverbs in the Bezhta language of Dagestan in 2000 and 2005, respectively. Another related language has now been added to this list, after almost two decades of work: the Andi language.

The first international conference on “The Role of Religion in the Turkic Culture” (Budapest, 9-11 September) gathered scholars from around the world to exchange papers about the interaction of religion and society among the Turkic peoples of Eurasia, both past and present.  Presentations dealt with issues relevant to the religions that have been espoused at one time or another by various Turkic peoples -- Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Tengrianism and Manicheism .

In early June, IBT held a seminar in Moscow on what is known in Bible translation circles as Scripture Engagement. The seminar was attended by 21 people from 11 different ethnic groups of Russia and the CIS into whose language IBT has already translated significant portions of the Bible.  Many of the participants were not IBT translation team staff, but rather members of churches that are using IBT’s Scripture translations.

IBT has published a new book containing the first-ever translation of the Old Testament books of Jonah, Ruth and Esther in the Ingush language of the North Caucasus. Ingush is spoken as a mother tongue by more than 300,000 people in the Russian Republic of Ingushetia, with a total of about a half million ethnic Ingush in the entire Russian Federation. It is closely related to the neighboring Chechen language.

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.