Baiboly Malagasy (1865)
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The Baiboly Malagasy (1865) is the Bible in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. It descends from the first Malagasy Bible, printed in 1835 by the London Missionary Society and largely the work of the Welsh missionaries David Jones and David Griffiths. It was the first substantial work printed in the language.
That 1835 translation worked from the original Hebrew and Greek, not only from English versions. The 1865 edition is a correction of that text, made between 1865 and 1866 according to the description of the SWORD module this version comes from. Who led the revision, and by what principles, we could not confirm.
A word on scope. This is a nineteenth-century translation, with the spelling and vocabulary of its day, and spoken Malagasy has moved on since. It serves anyone who wants the historic text of the Malagasy Bible, but it does not replace modern editions. It is a complete Bible, all 66 books. In Joel (4 chapters) and Malachi (3) it follows the Hebrew chapter numbering, which differs from many other versions.
The text is in the public domain. For Malagasy speakers, and for anyone studying the history of missions in Madagascar, it is the bridge between Scripture and the language of a whole people, and the first Malagasy version on Midvash.