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After 34 painstaking years, a small band of Inuit translators have finally delivered an Inuktitut-language Bible to one of the most-Christian regions in Canada.

The completed Inuit-language bible, a $1.7 million joint project of the the Canadian Bible Society and the Anglican Church, is set to be launched on June 3 in a ceremony at the igloo-shaped St. Jude’s Anglican Cathedral in Iqaluit.

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“We’re happy to have this out of the way,” said Rev. Canon Jonas Allooloo, who was with the translation team since its 1978 inception. “It’s been 34 years and we can do something else now.”

Five Anglican ministers led the project, and notably, all were Inuk. “For the first time in Canada, the entire translation was done by mother tongue speakers of the language rather than by missionaries,” reads a statement by the Canadian Bible Society.

The team was thus well-equipped to bridge the many linguistic and cultural gaps between the Inuit and millennia-old Middle Eastern texts.