The presentation of the Bible translated into the Ossetic language was held at the National Scientific Library of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania in Vladikavkaz on September 20, 2022. This is the first ever complete translation of the Bible into the Iron variant of the Ossetic language, spoken by five-sixths of the Ossetic population (about 600,000 people). This publication is combined the New Testament translated by the Institute for Bible Translation and the Old Testament translated by the Bible Society in Russia. This work took 25 years overall.

IBT has recently published a revised edition of the Gospel of Luke in the endangered Chukchi language, spoken by about 5,000 people on Russian’s northern Pacific rim. The Chukchi text is accompanied by the Russian Synodal translation of Luke in a parallel column. This is IBT’s fifth diglot edition of Luke among the indigenous peoples of Russia’s Far North and Far East, following similar publications in Nanai and Koryak (2012), Itelmen (2013), and Evenki (2014).  The first edition of Luke in Chukchi was published in 2004 and released with a recording on audiocassettes.

IBT’s diglot Turkmen/Russian edition of the book of Proverbs has been presented to the Russian Orthodox church in Ashgabat, the capital city of Turkmenistan, by Archbishop Theophylact during his visit to Ashgabat on June 16. This edition of the book of Proverbs was prepared by IBT in close coordination with the Russian Orthodox Church. The book will be distributed for free in Orthodox churches in Turkmenistan to people who are interested in studying the Russian language by means of this publication.

IBT has published and officially presented the first-ever translation of the full Bible in Uzbek. This Turkic language is spoken by up to 30 million people worldwide, primarily in the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan. Uzbek now joins about 600 other languages that have a full translation of the canonical Holy Scriptures (less than 10% of the world’s total languages.)
The official Bible presentation was held by BSU and IBT in Tashkent on June 1, 2017 at the headquarters of the Tashkent diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church. The presentation was attended by representatives of Uzbekistan’s Committee of Religious Affairs, the Russian Orthodox Church, the embassies of Russia and the United States, the United Bible Societies (including the Bible societies of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), the Islamic University of Tashkent, and leaders of various Christian confessions.

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.

On 21 October the New Testament in the Mari-Hill language, published by the Institute for Bible Translation in Helsinki, was presented to the Mari people at the National Library of Mari El in Yoshkar-Ola (Russian Federation).