Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia, June 22, 2023
Photo: ibt.org
Thanks to a joint effort from the Institute for Bible Translation and the Russian Bible Society, 1.4 million people can now read the complete Bible in their native Bashkir tongue.
Bashkir, a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch, is co-official language of the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, and is also spoken by people in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, and other post-Soviet states, and among the Bashkir diaspora.
The Bashkir Bible translation project initially began in 1975, with a reprint of the Gospel of John by a group of students from Kazan. The Institute began working on new translations in the early 1990s, reports the Institute for Bible Translation.
Over the years, several books of the New Testament were published separately, and in 2014—the entire New Testament.
At the same time, the Russian Bible Society was busy translating the books of the Old Testament. The Book of Genesis was published in 2010. The Institute and Society merged their projects in late 2015. Great effort was made to harmonize Biblical terms and stylistically edit all the texts.
The translation of the complete Bible was thoroughly checked by Institute of History, Language, and Literature of the Ufa Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where the book was publicly presented on June 19.
Electronic versions of the Bashkir Bible are available from the Institute for Bible Translations.
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