In late 2023, a training seminar was held at IBT’s Moscow office in connection with a completely new activity for the Institute, something called Oral Bible Translation (OBT). The OBT methodology has already been tested in various places around the world and several potential staff members for future OBT projects had taken part in an international OBT conference in the summer of 2023. The OBT approach makes it possible to start full-fledged work on Bible translation where there is no written language or where mother-tongue literacy has not been widely promulgated. IBT’s fall seminar brought together about 20 potential exegetical advisors from IBT and a partner organization who are considering joining an OBT project to serve various minority peoples of Russia...

The Uzbek Bible translation project is one of those projects where the full Bible, already translated and published (in 2016), is being actively incorporated into the life of local Christian communities and into Uzbek society at large.  The Uzbek Bible app for smartphones holds the record for being the most downloaded IBT app for several years in a row. One of the project's translators, let’s call her Esther (she asked us not to use her real name since Uzbekistan is a Muslim country), gladly shared a few stories about her many years of work in the project and plans for the future.

“Uzbek Christian believers looked forward greatly to getting the full Bible. The attitude to the Bible varies among traditional Muslims, but the main thing that all of our readers noted, regardless of their religion, was that the translated text is very clear. One Uzbek scholar, who is a university professor and a traditional Muslim, even said, ‘This is one of the best translated books I’ve ever read in Uzbek.’ ...

“This was our toughest consultant checking session yet!” confessed Vitaly, IBT’s former director and still a consultant for a North Caucasian Scripture translation project which for safety reasons we were asked not to name. Let’s simply call it “the T-language”. Vitaly then shared some of the difficulties in the checking session and how most of them were overcome, leaving behind a sense of joy for a job well done by all the translation team members...
 

In December 2022 a new phase began in the life of the Institute for Bible Translation: Dr. Vitaly Voinov, IBT director since 2013, handed over his directorship to his successor, Bron Cleaver. We interviewed them individually and would like to offer you an insight into this change in the life of IBT.

Vitaly, was it a valuable life experience for you to be the director of IBT? What was most important?

Infinitely valuable! This gave me the opportunity to participate not just in one or two translation projects, but in almost fifty different projects at the same time. I got to know a lot of very talented people dedicated to their language and was able to contribute to maintaining and promoting their work. I also realized that not all problems can simply be “rammed through” by personal willpower: you need to be able to get other people to work together to solve problems that are too big for one person, even the director...

The full Bible in the Kurmanji dialect spoken by Kurds in Armenia and Russia is in the final stages of work, and we at IBT hope that it will be published already in 2024. At this last stage of work, the figure of the philological editor becomes particularly important. This is the translation team’s mother-tongue Kurmanji speaker who improves the translation in terms of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and naturalness, and together with the other team members assesses corrections suggested by reviewers. In the course of the past several decades of work, the IBT/SIL/UBS Kurmanji translation project has had several philological editors, and a highly professional new language specialist joined the team in 2017 – just in time to pull together the work on the full Bible...

Synaru, a member of IBT’s Altai translation team, recently visited IBT Moscow office and shared her joy with us: she had just defended her Master’s thesis in theology on the topic of Bible translation into Altai. However, the time to relax and celebrate was very short: Synaru was now facing her next challenge – to revise the Altai NT Epistles so that they would be more easily understood by Altai believers. 

Synaru’s university education was in philology (language and literature studies), and as already mentioned above, her graduate studies were in theology. But what a long path she had to tread to attain her degrees! “I was born in the mountains and grew up in a shepherd’s family,”  she started her story. “Our settlement on the Kazakh-Mongolian border was the most remote village from the capital in Gorno-Altaisk and therefore the furthest from civilization in the entire Republic of Altai...

Karachay Bible translator Lyudmila came to the IBT Moscow office from the village of Kyzyl-Pokun in the Karachay-Cherkessia region of the North Caucasus in order to audio record her first translated Bible portion – the book of Jonah. Her younger daughter Farida, who lives in Moscow, read the translation aloud while Lyudmila listened and made suggestions for improving the reading. At the end of their two day working session, I asked the translator to share how she joined the Bible translation project.

 “I grew up in the Soviet era, when our Muslim people didn’t particularly flaunt their commitment to traditional religion. Nevertheless, Muslim rituals were present in my childhood in one way or another, and two things always struck me about them: the need to repeat prayers in Arabic without understanding their meaning, and the tradition of standing up respectfully when pronouncing the name of the Prophet Muhammad, even though there was no similar custom to do the same when pronouncing the name of Allah Himself. One more thing I was curious about as a child: what is this mysterious word Amen that is used at the end of Muslim rituals (as well as at the end of Christian prayers)? 

The twin-peaked Mount Elbrus is located right on the border of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Many well-known legends and myths have been reinterpreted by the local peoples and connected with their native lands and this enormous mountain: it was here that the Argonauts searched for the golden fleece, and Prometheus, who gave fire to mankind, was also chained to a cliff on Mt. Elbrus. The Abaza people see Mount Elbrus in the biblical story of the Flood. According to one of their legends, Noah's ark should have stopped on Elbrus. Noah addressed the mountain: “Please stop the ark, let it abide on your top!” But the mountain refused Noah, so the Lord punished it by splitting its top in two, and the ark eventually stopped on Mt. Ararat...

The land of Khakassia in south Siberia is unique in many respects. It is rightfully considered the “archaeological Mecca” of Siberia, a land of rich history and ancient culture. More than 30,000 archeological remains have been preserved there. Khakassia is also called “the land of 1,000 lakes” and is well known for the healing properties of the mineral water in several of these lakes. Lake Tus (“salt” in Khakas) is even called “the Khakas Dead Sea.” As in the Dead Sea in Israel, you can float on its salty waters without sinking.

The contemporary Khakas people are descendants of the Yenisei Kyrgyz, who ruled Khakassia in the 7^th century A.D. and were later conquered by Mongolian tribes. Today’s Khakas are neither Muslim, like the Kyrgyz of Central Asia, not Buddhist, like their neighbouring Tuvans, who were also dominated by Mongolia for part of their history...