Translation principles


  • The Bible and Bible portions
  • Illustrated Bible stories for children
  • Polyglot editions, concordances, interlinears, textual commentaries, Bible dictionaries, scholarly biblical studies, and applied linguistic research

Source Texts

In most IBT projects, the standard Old Testament source text used is the Masoretic Hebrew Text (Biblia Неbrаiса Stuttgartensia), while the standard New Testament source text used is the Koiné Greek text (UBS 5th ed. or Nestle-Aland 28th ed.)  However, the tradition of Bible translation into the Russian language is followed in projects where this is requested by the local community. In cases where a source text other than BHS or UBS5/NA28 is used, semantically significant textual variants are noted in footnotes. 

Translation Team Structure

IBT translation teams typically consist of: a mother tongue speaker of the language, an exegetical advisor, a philological editor, a comprehension tester, a stylistic editor, a translation consultant, and a project coordinator.  The translation of each book goes through several stages of drafting and editing, including field testing with native speakers and external reviewing with community members. At the end of the process, an experienced translation consultant takes the translation through a final check and signs off on the translation.