Hiikkaa Ammayyaa Banamaa Haaraa

The Biblica Open New Oromo Contemporary Version (in Oromo, Kitaaba Qulqulluu, Hiikkaa Ammayyaa Banamaa Haaraa, Loqoda Dhiʼaa) is Biblica's whole Bible for Afaan Oromoo, one of the most widely spoken languages of Ethiopia, with communities in northern Kenya as well. The subtitle Loqoda Dhiʼaa tells you who it is for: this is the western dialect edition. The text is copyright 2022, and Biblica publishes the same content in Ethiopic script as well as this Latin-script edition.

The name gives away the method: Hiikkaa Ammayyaa means contemporary translation. As with Biblica's other versions, the work starts from the original languages and aims at everyday speech, letting the meaning arrive whole even when the sentence has to change shape to sound natural in Oromo.

For readers of western Oromo it is a complete, recent and readable Bible. The honest limit has two sides. One is geographic: speakers of other varieties, eastern or southern, will notice words and forms that are not their own. The other is shared by every meaning-based translation: where the original allows more than one reading, the translator's choice is invisible unless you read with another version beside it.

It is free on Midvash because Biblica, the publisher that holds the NIV, released the text through open.bible under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0). It can be read, quoted and shared without asking, with credit to Biblica and the same license.