‘Translating God’ Colloquium (Stirling, May 2017)

Translating God’ Colloquium 4-5 May 2017

Selected papers have been published in Translating Wor(l)ds: Christianity across Cultural Boundaries, Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz (ed.), (Collectanea Instituti Anthropos 51), Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag, 2019. The volume also includes contributions of the 2015 ‘Translating Christianities’ colloquium.

See more details at https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783896657954-1/titelei-inhaltsverzeichnis.

The contributions to this book address the translation of culture in the context of religion, showing that this can be a bi-directional or even multiple process because the works we analyse give evidence of how their authors resort to different cultural traditions and languages and interrelate them through translation, all trying to achieve one principal objective: that of communication across boundaries.

Thus our studies analyse texts in literary, ethnohistorical and/or linguistic terms, highlighting the processes of translation across cultures. On the one hand they include studies of the missionary context of the Early Middle Ages (Murdoch) and of colonially dominated cultures in Latin America (Sachse, Dedenbach-Salazar, Sarion), India (Eliasson), China (Jasper), Africa (Colenso) and Australia (Moore), from the 16th to the early 20th century. On the other hand, they analyse literary works with respect to how these transmit and translate culture: one a German play in the context of Islam (Irving), the other one a novel of the Haitian diaspora in the USA (Darroch).  Another contribution presents the challenges of how the concept of religion itself is conveyed in contemporary scholarly contexts (Roberts).

The  works and con/texts we analyse here reflect understandings of Christianity which are not always orthodox and where authors of the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial worlds try to convey and communicate cosmovisions and religious concepts to recipients beyond the original cultural spheres. By using different methodological tools, the contributors to this volume show the manifold and innovative ways in which this field of the translation of culture can be approached.

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