Bibliya e satu Dzando — Dzando Scripture Portions (DR Congo)
Overview
Bibliya e satu Dzando ("the Holy Bible in Dzando") is the Gospel of Luke in the Dzando language of Sud-Ubangi Province, DRC, published by Beyond Translation under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license and available via YouVersion/Bible.com (ID 4313; abbreviation: DZN). This represents the first scripture translation into Dzando, produced as part of Beyond Translation's Church-Centric Bible Translation (CCBT) initiative in the DRC — a program that trained church leaders from 15 DRC language communities to translate Luke as the foundational scripture portion for their communities.
Language and People
Dzando (ISO 639-3: dzn; also called Dzando-Buja or Buja) is a Bantu language: Niger-Congo → Atlantic-Congo → Benue-Congo → Bantoid → Narrow Bantu → Zone C, C.41 (Buja subgroup of the Ngombe cluster). It is closely related to other Zone C languages of the Congo-Ubangi basin, including Ngombe (C.41) and Buja.
The Dzando community inhabits Zongo Territory and Libenge Territory, Sud-Ubangi Province, northwestern DRC — a region in the Ubangi River basin near the border with the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.
Estimated speakers: approximately 22,000 (Johnstone/Mandryk 2001; SIL data).
Publishing and Organizations
Published by Beyond Translation (beyondtranslation.org, Arlington, Texas) under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, as part of their DRC community translation initiative reaching 15 language communities and 160,000+ speakers.