On October 17, 2025, the Institute for Bible Translation (IBT) celebrated the 30th anniversary of its work in Russia. The anniversary celebration was held at St. Andrew's Monastery as part of an international conference called "Linguistic Forum 2025: Bible Translation as a Means of Language Preservation and Development. Traditions and New Approaches," organized by IBT in cooperation with the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Over the past three decades of work, IBT has helped many peoples in Russia and its surrounding countries to receive the Holy Scriptures in their native languages, thereby contributing to the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity.
IBT is a Russian scholarly organization that is engaged in the translation, publication, and distribution of the Bible in the languages of the non-Slavic peoples of Russia and neighboring countries. Its goal is to produce translations that are accurate in meaning yet clear and natural-sounding, which requires a thorough knowledge of both the source biblical text and the recipient language.
IBT’s story started in 1973 in Stockholm, where Dr. Borislav Arapovich founded the "Oriental Bible Institute", the organization's name at the time. Two decades later (exactly 30 years ago in 1995), IBT was registered as a full-fledged Russian organization.
Throughout all these years, IBT has worked on translating the Holy Scriptures into more than 60 languages in close cooperation with the Russian Academy of Sciences and leading international Bible organizations,. For this large-scale task, IBT has brought together linguists, philologists, theologians, and biblical scholars from various regions of Russia, neighboring countries, and other parts of the world, all driven by the common vision of bringing the Bible to contemporary readers in their mother tongues.
During the course of the evening, guests at the anniversary celebration were addressed by the following speakers : Bronwen Cleaver, Director of IBT in Russia; Mattias Hallquist, Director of IBT in Sweden; Hegumen Dionisy (Shlenov), Father Superior of St. Andrew's Monastery; Anita Laakso, Director of IBT in Finland; Marianne Beerle-Moor, who headed the Russian IBT from 1997 to 2013; Archpriest Alexander Troitsky, Chairman of the IBT Board; and Andrei Kibrik, Director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A message from IBT founder Borislav Arapovich was also read.
Over the 30 years of the Institute's work as a Russian organization, 65 translation projects have been launched, and more than 400 publications have been released. As a result, the complete Bible has been published in 11 languages, the New Testament in 20 languages, and the Children's Bible in 22 languages. Straight Scripture translations have been augmented by new kinds of publications during these years: Bible stories and individual books of the Bible with illustrations by folk artists; polyglot editions for scholarly purposes; bilingual and trilingual editions to facilitate readers' understanding of the text and for language study; liturgical texts at the request of local church dioceses; and thematic publications, such as a series on the Old Testament prophets and collections of Gospel parables. Special attention is currently being paid to digital, audio, and video publications: all of IBT’s translations are published online on the website (www.ibt.org.ru and www.ibtrussia.org) — in the Bible browser and the "Electronic Bible" program, in apps, as audiobooks and as short Scripture videos, the latter two especially important for languages of primarily oral peoples. Projects to translate the Holy Scriptures into Russian Sign Language for the deaf and hard of hearing have also been initiated. A recent new direction is Oral Bible Translation for non-written and recently written languages: in the past several years more than 15 such projects have been started in Dagestan alone. IBT is also engaged in regular training of its personnel via seminars and workshops on Bible translation and linguistics, trips to biblical sites, and distance learning courses.
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