Translation and religion: crafting regimes of identity

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Acknowledgements

I thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for funding the research project on translation and conversion accounts which provided the funds, time and opportunity to organize a conference on translation and religion in 2016. I thank my co-investigators Matthias Frenz, Milind Wakankar and John Zavos for ongoing discussions over the life of the project which helped me develop my arguments. I thank Matthias Frenz and Theo Hermans for having read parts of an earlier draft and for their critical comments. All failings, however, are entirely my own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hephzibah Israel teaches Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She led an AHRC-funded collaborative research project (2014–2017) under their ‘Translating Cultures’ theme which focused on the role of translation in the movement of religious concepts across languages and the ways in which this impacted autobiographical writing on conversion experiences. She is author of Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (2011). She has guest edited (2018), along with John Zavos (University of Manchester), a special section on Indian traditions of life writing focusing on religious conversion for the journal South Asia.

ORCID

Hephzibah Israel http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0109-6262

Notes

1 I wish to state at the outset that although Matthias Frenz and I had originally planned to write this introduction together, he was unable, due to unforeseen circumstances, to do so in the end. Matthias contributed immensely to the thematic conceptualisation of this special issue and has co-edited this issue and I owe him much appreciation for his help and encouragement throughout the process.

2 See Ludo Rocher (1984) for a detailed discussion of the reception of a text purporting to be a French translation of the Ezourvedam but was in fact found to be a forgery possibly composed by Jesuit missionaries.

3 F. Max Muller, for instance, was one such 19th-century scholar who proposed comparative methods in the study of both languages and religions, and promoted amongst other things, ‘the missionary alphabet’ as a universal system of transliteration to serve the philologist, historian and missionary alike (Proposals for a Missionary Alphabet, 1854, 1)

4 Eugine A Nida’s ouvre, well rehearsed in translation studies, displays such a focus.

5 As mentioned earlier, Mandair’s focus on translation to argue the construction of Sikhism as a religion is an exception.

6 Smith points out that ‘On True Religion’ or ‘On Genuine Worship’ would have been a ‘closer translation’.

7 For a detailed analysis of the anthropology debate from the standpoint of translation studies, see Sturge (2007). For a post-structuralist examination of ‘translation as representation’ which engages with key debates in anthropology, see Niranjana (1992).

8 See project website for more details: http://www.ctla.llc.ed.ac.uk/

9 Narratives of Transformation: Religious conversion and Indian traditions of ‘Life Writing,’ guest edited by H. Israel and J. Zavos, South Asia. 41, 2, p. 352–365.