Itlajtol toteco

The Itlajtol toteco: Santa Biblia is the complete Bible, without the Deuterocanon, in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, a variety of the Aztecs' language spoken today in the Huasteca region of Mexico. Copyright is 2005, held by Wycliffe Bible Translators, which does not publish the team's names. The title says something like "the word of Our Lord".

There is no public account of the method, but the text speaks for itself: this is a meaning-based translation that spells out what the original leaves implicit. In Psalm 23 the metaphor becomes a comparison: as a keeper cares for the little lambs, the Lord cares for me. In John 3:16 the sentence adds that the Son was sent "to die for them". Spanish words such as borrego appear where everyday speech already uses them.

It serves speakers of this variety very well when they want to grasp the text on first reading. The honest limit is the price of clarity: when a translation explains, it decides for the reader, and anyone studying the exact form of a verse needs a more literal translation alongside. Nahuatl also varies a great deal by region, and speakers of other varieties will notice differences in vocabulary and spelling, which here follows the Spanish model.

The rights holder released the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. It allows anyone to read and share it for free, as long as the text stays unaltered and is not used commercially. That is why the Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl Bible is here in full to read for free on Midvash, but is left out of the public API, audio and AI features, which would go beyond what the license allows.