The whole Bible, in Olutachoni. Sixty-six books in a language that has never before held a text of this size.

What has been finished

All sixty-six books, Old Testament and New, rendered in Olutachoni. Not a selection, not a set of readings for the church year — the complete text.

For a language that lives mostly in speech, that is an unusual thing to own. Most of what has ever been written down in Olutachoni would fit in one folder. This is a book.

Why the size of it matters

A translation on this scale forces decisions a word list never has to make. How is the language spelled? Where two wards say a word differently, which form is printed and which is noted as a variant? What is the word for mercy, for covenant, for inheritance, when the nearest term carries a slightly different weight? Every one of those choices, once printed, becomes a reference the next writer can work from.

That is why a complete Bible tends to be the point at which a spoken language acquires a written standard — not because of what the book says, but because of how much of it there is. Olutachoni now has a body of prose long enough to argue from.

It matters here for a second reason. A community whose language is filed as somebody else’s dialect is a community that can be counted as somebody else. We have written elsewhere about what that has already cost us. A shelf of one’s own scripture is a hard thing to file under another name.

The launch

Saturday, 12 September 2026 — Webuye, Bungoma County.

The venue and the timings are still being confirmed. They will be published here and on the gathering entry as soon as they are settled. If you are travelling, check this page in the week before.

Who did the work

To be completed. The translators, the reviewers and the bodies that carried this work deserve to be named here in full and spelled correctly. The Trust will not publish half a list. Send the names and they will be added.

Other Olutachoni scripture

This is not the only Scripture work in the language, and this page should not pretend otherwise. Bible Translation & Literacy (BTL) East Africa has had an Olutachoni translation under way since 2016. That is a separate effort from this one. Where their work is published the Trust will link to it rather than talk over it — readers deserve to know what exists.

If you are coming

The launch is open. Bring the people in your family who still speak the language best — the ones who will hear whether it is right.

Write to hello@tachoni.org if you are travelling from outside the county, or if you are bringing a group, so we can plan for the numbers.