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...