Missionary Translation Research Articles

Missionary Translations of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom into the Languages of the Indigenous Peoples of the Russian Empire

Missionary Translations of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom into the Languages of the Indigenous Peoples of the Russian Empire

Missionary Linguistics and the Protestant Policies for Missionary (Re)translations (English into Judeo-Spanish) in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract Missionary Linguistics attempts to analyze texts either written or (re)translated by missionaries, especially those produced by Spanish and Portuguese ministers in Latin America and Asia. However, some more specific case studies have been taken for granted, such as the case of the Scottish Protestant missionaries who wanted to convert Sephardic Jews in Constantinople in the nineteenth century. This article aims to illustrate the origin of the re(translation) policies of Protestant missionaries, such as those of the Free Church of Scotland mission in the nineteenth century. Moreover, we will describe the theoretical basis of Missionary Linguistics and the existing link between this innovative and modern branch of linguistics and Colonial Linguistics, thus showing common grounds as well as a way in which both could be combined into a single research field.

Коллекции раритетной христианской литературы на монгольском языке в хранилищах Забайкальского края и Бурятии

Introduction. The paper examines collections of rare Mongolian-language Christian editions housed at depositories of Zabaykalsky Krai and Buryatia. Goals. The study attempts a socioarchaeographic analysis of the mentioned collections at the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies (SB RAS) and the Kuznetsov Zabaykalsky Krai Museum of Local History and Lore. Materials and methods. In terms of methodology, the work rests on ‘cognitive history’ and some aspects of historical phenomenology. The paper assumes a content analysis of the collections be instrumental both in identifying Christian Buryat readers’ queries throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in revealing specificities of missionary activity among Mongolic peoples in pre-revolutionary Russia. Conclusions. The content analysis of the two collections shows Transbaikalia was witnessing a specific cooperation between Protestant and Orthodox Christian missions. Personal libraries of Buryat Christians were largely compiled from Mongolian translations of the Bible funded mainly by the Protestant missions. The study attests to that the most promising missionary activity among Buryats (and Mongols at large) — dissemination of Christianity via primary education — was not supported by representatives of the missions. Our insights into the history of the collections show that results of Christian missionary translation activities aroused interest of Buryat Buddhists, and the latter tended to include such biblical translations into their libraries. Due to linguistic and historical circumstances, the Russian collections of Mongolian-language Christian publications have remained virtually unattended — both in terms of bibliographic description and scholarly research — for a long time. However, territorial, manufacturing and historical circumstances make the examined editions essentially unique. Our content analysis confirms there is a need for such investigations to reveal a coherent agenda of religious publications once used for the development of Christianity within Mongolian culture.

Gender and the Work of Missionary Translation: Black Women Interpreters among the Jesuits in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias

Gender and the Work of Missionary Translation: Black Women Interpreters among the Jesuits in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias

From Missionary Translation to Local Theological Inquiry: A Narrative History of the Lisu Bible

The Lisu are a largely Christian minority group in south-west China who, as an oral culture, express their faith more through a set of Christian practices done as a group and less through bible reading as individuals. Even so, the Lisu practice of Christianity specifically, and Lisu culture more generally, was profoundly impacted by the written scriptures. During the initial evangelisation of the Lisu by the China Inland Mission, missionaries created a written script for the Lisu language. Churches were constructed and organised, which led to the creation of bible schools and the work of bible translation. In the waves of government persecution after 1949, Lisu New Testaments were hidden away up in the mountains by Lisu Christians. After 1980, the Lisu reclaimed their faith by listening to the village elders tell the Old Story around the fires and reopening the churches that had been closed for twenty-two years. And they reclaimed their bible by retrieving the scriptures from the hills and copying them in the evening by the light of a torch. The Lisu bible has its own narrative history, consisting of script creating, translating, migrating, and copying by hand. At times it was largely influenced by the mission narrative, but at other times, the Lisu bible itself was the lead character in the story. Ultimately, the story of the Lisu bible reflects the Lisu Christian story of moving from missionary beginnings to local leadership and, ultimately, to local theological inquiry.

Shakespeare in Chinese as Christian Literature: Isaac Mason and Ha Zhidao’s Translation of Tales from Shakespeare

The introduction of Shakespeare to China was through the Chinese translation of Mary and Charles Lamb’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays, Tales from Shakespeare. The Western missionaries’ Chinese translations of the Lambs’ adaptation have rarely been studied. Isaac Mason and his assistant Ha Zhidao’s 1918 translation of the Lambs’ book, entitled Haiguo Quyu (Interesting Tales from Overseas Countries), is one of the earliest Chinese versions translated by Christian missionaries. Although Mason was a Christian missionary and his translation was published by The Christian Literature Society for China, Mason adopted an indirect way to propagate Christian thoughts and rewrote some parts that are related to Christian belief. The rewriting is manifested in several aspects, including the use of four-character titles with Confucian ethical tendencies, rewriting paragraphs with hidden Christian ideas and highlighting themes closely related to Christian ethics, such as mercy, forgiveness and justice. While unique in its time, such a strategy of using the Chinese translation of Shakespeare for indirect missionary work had an impact on subsequent missionary translations.

The Invisibility of Korean Translators in Missionary Translation: The Case of the Peep of Day (1833)

This study attempts to shed light on how missionaries marginalized the role played by local Koreans engaged in the translation of an evangelical tract, The Peep of Day (1833), into Korean by comparing the English source text with its Chinese and Korean translations. The subjects of comparison for this exercise were the translators’ choice of words from the source text for adaptation, addition and omission. This analysis revealed: 1) That the Chinese translation was the source text for Korean version; 2) Chinese translators were more active in acculturating the tract by adapting, omitting or adding to the source text; and 3) Korean translators were for the most part faithful to the Chinese version. In addition to this comparative analysis, research on the translators themselves has been included in this paper to trace how Protestant Christianity was trans-mitted to Korea and the dynamics of early missionary work.

La recepción de la traductología latinoamericana en Chequia: inspiraciones temáticas, metodológicas y didácticas

En las últimas décadas, la traductología ha venido buscando una renovación metodológica en las áreas lingüísticas y culturales marginales y marginadas hasta hace poco (cf. Lambert, 2010), aspecto que abre las puertas a la introducción de las concepciones y temas relegados al segundo plano durante décadas, los latinoamericanos entre ellos, ya sea por una limitada accesibilidad lingüística, ya sea por cierta subestimación de los textos por el público receptor. Sin embargo, la traductología latinoamericana ha venido ganando terreno en la investigación a nivel internacional, emancipándose de sus raíces metodológicas europeas y abriendo temas y problemas nuevos o novedosos no solo para la disciplina misma, sino también otras áreas de investigación, fenómenos que se reflejan entre otras características también en la proliferación de las escuelas y programas universitarios dedicados a la formación de traductores (Vavroušová, 2015a, 16). Estos son los motivos que justifican la importancia de la presentación de los temas y autores en otros ámbitos culturales.

“Tapwaroro is true”: Indigenous Voice and the Heteroglossia of Methodist Missionary Translation in British New Guinea

In the semiotic ideology of many Christian discursive practices, it is assumed that any language can convey the same message of salvation, and any person is capable of true belief, no matter how it is expressed. Evangelism, especially by Western missions, thus centers on translating Christian texts into vernacular languages. This article considers these understandings and practices by examining the written discourse of Australian Methodist missionaries in the early colonial period in New Guinea. These missionaries desired an encounter with heathens in an unevangelized field, but they operated in a colonial terrain defined by the politics of past encounters between Australians and Melanesians. In their writings, missionary authors parody the voices of indigenous speakers and present a world in which missionary and native cannot arrive at a shared understanding of religion. Their parody usually involves quoting one term, taparoro, as a word used by natives for the mission and its activities. Having presented a world defined by a persistent gap in understanding, missionaries appropriate this particular sign of their own otherness to others as a basis for a new mission register into which they can translate Christian ideas. In so doing, they do not simply impose one dominant code as a metalinguistic standard, but fashion a new discourse out of available materials in a complex field of interlingualism.

“Wonderful Nonsense”: Confucianism in the British Romantic Period

Abstract The first complete English versions of Confucian texts appeared between 1809 and 1814 in separate endeavors by Joshua Marshman and Robert Morrison. In 1814, the London Quarterly Review assessed Marshman's translations as “nonsense.” In 1816, the same journal declared that the achievements of the Anglophone missionaries who translated Chinese were “wonderful.” Modern and contemporary commentators have recognized that the translations were primitive. Nonetheless the works stimulated interest in Romantic Britain. This article argues that the missionary versions of Confucian philosophy are significant within several political contexts of British Romanticism. The translations arose amid the diplomatic complications of British Asia. Marshman and Morrison produced their Confucian texts in attempts to appease local administration that suspected their religious activities might cause unrest. Yet the translations also stimulated enough interest to secure funds for the missionaries’ religious efforts. In Britain, responses to Confucianism occurred in three prominent debates: the rivalry between Catholicism and Protestantism; China as an emerging site of Anglo-French rivalry; and liberal commentary on principles of leadership with allusion to Britain's ruler, the Prince Regent. The missionary translations have been neglected as poor Confucianism but are significant within the political contexts of the Romantic period and the problematic concept of Sinology.

Muslim Translators and Translations of the Qur'an into English

Until the 1940s, English translations of the Qur'an were (with the notable exception of translations by Indian Muslims early in the twentieth century) mostly undertaken by non-Muslims and viewed with some misgiving by most Muslim scholars. As late as 1929 the Egyptian al-Azhar, internationally regarded as the most prestigious Muslim organisation in the world, publically burnt a translation of the Qur'an, even though it had been translated by a Muslim. It was only well after the Second World War that the Egyptian authorities officially allowed the publication of a translation of the Qur'an.More recently, English translations by Muslims have proliferated and now flourish worldwide: as far as the number of Qur'an-translations is concerned, no other language is better represented. However, diverging English translations of the Qur'an have become more and more of a religious and political battleground. This article discusses the development of English from a ‘coloniser's language’ to an English ‘friendly to Islam’ – especially in India and Pakistan. It also sketches the impact of Christian missionary translations of the Qur'an into English and discusses the problems faced by scholars with regard to English as a powerful second language, specifically in terms of the King Fahd Complex for Printing the Holy Qur'an in Saudi Arabia, which has gradually taken prominence over Al-Azhar on the international stage since the 1980s.

Early Translations of English Fiction into Arabic: The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe

This essay examines the translations into Arabic of The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, two of the first works of modern prose fiction to be translated into Arabic in the nineteenth century. Both are didactic and allegorical narratives that belong to the prehistory of the European realist novel; they were originally written in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, and by the early nineteenth century had become among the most popular fictional works in Europe, both in their original languages and in translation. They were translated into Arabic at various stages of the nineteenth-century revival (nahḍa). The translations of each work are dealt with separately, but demonstrate certain shared issues and problems of translation in this period. These include the negotiation of different levels of language within Arabic, as suitable local equivalents for the translated work are found; the vital role of individual effort, and the placing of this within a wider educational and patriotic project; the awareness of European and local structures of power; and most importantly of all, perhaps, a shared didactic impulse. The two translations of The Pilgrim's Progress provide evidence of a shift of approach towards translation within the missionary project. The first translation (1834) belongs largely to an Evangelical mode of universal translatability, which tends to ignore distinctions between languages and between levels and registers within a language, in an attempt to proselytize as many people as possible. The second translation was made only ten years later for the American missionaries by the Protestant convert Buṭrus al-Bustānī. It belongs to a more sensitive mode of free translation into a literary idiom influenced by adab norms, and aimed at an educated readership. The two translations also — despite evidence of their appeal to at least fairly wide Christian audiences — seem to have been especially relevant to Syrian Protestant converts, for whom the radically solitary experience of Bunyan's protagonist Christian corresponded to their own experiences of personal conversion. Robinson Crusoe was also translated twice — by missionaries in an abridged version in 1835, and in a full version, outside the missionary framework, in 1861. This second translation was made by Buṭrus al-Bustānī, after his period of close collaboration with the missionaries had ended and he had moved to more ecumenical educational and patriotic projects. His translation demonstrates both continuity with and breaks away from the earlier missionary translations of both The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. His version of Robinson Crusoe is still presented as a didactic and exemplary narrative, more than a realist novel; an emphasis on the individual struggle and suffering of the protagonist is preserved, as are markers of the work's Christian and Puritan provenance. This personal effort is now, however, placed within a larger, patriotic and educational, framework.

“A Gift for the Jewish People”: Henry Einspruch's Der Bris Khadoshe as Missionary Translation and as Yiddish Literature

The 1941 Yiddish translation of the New Testament by Henry Einspruch marked a turning point in the history of Yiddish translations of the New Testament aimed at proselytizing Jews. Breaking free from a centuries-long tradition in which Yiddish translators relied heavily on German translations, Einspruch produced a version that, in more fully mobilizing the Hebrew components of Yiddish, was designed to remind his Jewish readers that Christianity emerged in a Jewish context. This translation style also reflected and even embodied new trends in the conceptualization of conversion from Judaism to Christianity. More remarkably, it also spoke to the growing cosmopolitanism of secular Yiddish culture.

The Use of Mayan Scripture in the Americas’ First Christian Theology

This study examines the work of the Dominican Friar Domingo de Vico, specifically his theology of or for the “Indians,” the Theologia Indorum, written originally in K’iche’ Maya in 1553–1554. While scholarship in recent decades has focused on the first post-contact writings by autochthonous Americans, particularly the Popol Wuj, or Mayan “Council Book,” and the early impact of Hispano-Catholicism, little attention has been paid to the influence of indigenous religion on colonial Christianity. Therefore, this study critically examines the first use of Mayan myths in Christian literature for a more nuanced understanding of the mutual dynamics between missionaries and the missionized as well as the distinctions between missionary translation strategies in the early formative decades of first contact.

Translation as Creative Treason: the Missionary Translation Projects in Late Imperial China

(2014). Translation as Creative Treason: the Missionary Translation Projects in Late Imperial China. Comparative Literature: East & West: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 112-137.

Eugene Albert Nida

Eugene Albert Nida D. Terence Langendoen Eugene Albert Nida, 44th president of the Linguistic Society of America, died on August 25, 2011, at the age of ninety-six in Madrid, Spain. Nida was born in Oklahoma City on November 11, 1914, and his family moved to Long Beach, California, when he was five years old. Nida became interested in working as a missionary Bible translator at an early age, and majored in Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles, in order to lay a foundation for understanding the Biblical source languages; he graduated summa cum laude in 1936. That same summer, he trained to become a missionary translator with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and shortly thereafter began work on Rarámuri (Tarahumara) in Mexico. His first publication, in an in-house SIL journal (Nida 1937), was a brief account of that language. Nida was forced to return to California in 1937 because of ill health, which changed his focus from doing Bible translation work in the field to training others to do so; he continued to teach for SIL every summer until 1953. He earned a master's degree in New Testament Greek from the University of Southern California in 1939, and his experience at SIL having convinced him of the value of linguistics for missionary translation work,1 he completed the Ph.D. program in Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1943, under the direction of Charles Carpenter Fries, Leonard Bloomfield, and Edgar Sturtevant. That same year he was ordained a minister in the Northern Baptist Convention, joined the staff of the American Bible Society (ABS) in New York, and married Althea Lucille Sprague. Althea and Eugene settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, and were together for fifty years until Althea's death in 1993. At ABS, Nida served as Associate Secretary for Versions until 1946 and then as Executive Secretary for Translations until he retired in 1984. He was a delegate to the conference that founded the United Bible Societies (UBS) in 1946, and in 1967 he helped forge an agreement between the UBS and the Vatican to undertake joint Bible translation projects worldwide. In 1970, the UBS appointed him as its Translations Research Coordinator, and throughout the 1970s he chaired the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project. Nida continued to be active in the field for two decades following his retirement. He published a memoir, Fascinated by languages (Nida 2003), and his last scholarly publication (Nida 2004) appeared in an Italian conference proceedings when he was ninety years old. He moved to Green Valley, Arizona, shortly after Althea's death, and then to Brussels, Belgium, where in 1997 he married the translator and interpreter Dr. María Elena Fernandez-Miranda, who survives him. Nida was honored with a festschrift (Black & Smalley 1974), a collection of his papers (Dil 1975), and a tribute to his career as a Bible translator (Stine 2004); he was also the recipient of several honorary doctorates, and in 2001 the ABS established the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship in his honor. Bloomfield had a profound impact on Nida's thinking about language. His Ph.D. dissertation, A synopsis of English syntax (Nida 1943), was a systematic description of English syntax based on Bloomfield's theory of immediate constituents, but it received [End Page 163] relatively little attention until SIL published it many years later (Nida 1960). By contrast, his two-volume textbook Morphology: The descriptive analysis of words (Nida 1944), which was designed to teach beginning linguistics students how to do morphological analysis on the basis of Bloomfield's conception of the morpheme as '[a] linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form' (Bloomfield 1933:161), immediately received enthusiastic reviews by Trager (1944), and by Hockett (1944) in Language. Hockett compared Nida's textbook favorably with such standards as Bloomfield 1933 and Bloch & Trager 1942 for teaching would-be linguists HOW to go about discovering the structure of words, and concluded: 'Anyone who is going to carry on linguistic analysis for any purpose should be taught with this book' (Hockett 1944:255). Nida's textbook dealt with all aspects of morpheme identification and classification. Because of Bloomfield...

Waiting for Biraban: Lancelot Threlkeld and the 'Chibcha Phenomenon' in Australian Missionary Linguistics

This paper is a historical and linguistic introduction to some of the missionary translations made by the Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld (1788–1859) into the language (sometimes called 'Awabakal') of the Hunter River–Lake Macquarie region of Australia's east coast. It focuses in particular on Threlkeld's shorter texts, including his 'Selections from the Scriptures', which is the earliest published scripture translation into an Australian language. The paper places Threlkeld and his Indigenous collaborator Biraban in their local historical context, and also in the broader context of missionary linguistics. It considers some unique features of this genre, and focuses on cases where missionary compositions provide the only substantial records of an extinct language (the 'Chibcha phenomenon'). Such cases raise the question of reliability, which we propose can be tested. We use as our example a grammatical feature, the subordinator =pa, to determine the extent to which Threlkeld's construction of subordinate clauses was idiomatic. We conclude that, in spite of a small number of anomalies, which are probably errors, Threlkeld's usage appears to have been remarkably consistent with what we know about the functioning of such clauses in Australian languages in general.

Translation, Manipulation and the Transfer of Negative Cultural Images

This article explores the long-ignored yet powerful role played by missionary translation in constructing the images of Chinese women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using the missionary Anna Safford’s translation Typical Women of China, it illustrates how images of women from classical Chinese literature were selected and manipulated to meet the translator’s own religious, cultural and political purposes, and how the translation reinforced the existing stereotypes created by other missionary writers. The author examines the historical and cultural contexts in which Safford’s translation was produced and analyzes the problematic relationship between the translated text and its originals. The article identifies the actual sources Safford used and investigates the translational and cultural strategies she developed. Additionally, it discusses the function and significance of missionary translation, as reflected by Safford’s work, in Chinese-American cross-cultural encounters.

:Strange Names of God: The Missionary Translation of the Divine Name and the Chinese Responses to Matteo Ricci's Shangti in Late Ming China, 1583-1644

One of the most precarious and daunting tasks for sixteenth-century European missionaries in the cross-cultural mission frontiers was translating the name of « God (Deus) into the local language. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) introduced the Chinese term

Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages (review)

Reviewed by: Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages Elaine Keillor Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages, 2004. Produced by Howard Bass and presented by the National Museum of the American Indian. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, CD (1), SFW CD 40480. This interesting recorded document was organized to coincide with the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. It contains thirty-three tracks of music connected with Christianity and sung in fifteen different languages: Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, Creek, Hawaiian, Hopi, Kiowa, Mohawk, Navajo, Oneida, Ojibwe, Seminole, Sioux, Tewa (Tano), and Yup'ik. The three opening essays in the booklet—written by Richard West Jr., Gerald L. Hill, and Edward Wapp Wahpeconiah—stress how the adoption of Christianity played a role in the retention of Native languages through missionary translations of scripture and hymn texts. While West presents his experience with the Baptist religion while growing up in his Cheyenne home, Hill and Wahpeconiah stress the range of styles to be encountered, a diversity that resulted from the varied forms of Christianity introduced by missionaries. Because of the variety of religious influences experienced by indigenous cultures, the tracks have been chosen to give a sampling of different musical styles resulting from the encounter between Christianity and Native traditions over the past four hundred years. The first six tracks have many similarities with standard powwow songs—that is, a call-and-response structure usually repeated four times with a wide, descending melodic contour. Basically monophonic (with only a single pitch heard at one time), these renditions sometimes have a doubling of the pitch at the octave above, either by women's voices or male voices in the response sections. Another track that is reflective of a particular native tradition is "Ke Aloha O Ka Haka," a hymn written by the deposed Hawaiian Queen Lili'uokalani on March 22, 1895. The short portion of the Tewa Mass included on this compilation does not seem to be an adaptation of a Franciscan mass setting, unlike late-seventeenth-century Abenaki-language versions found on Chant de la Jerusalem des terres froides: Québec—Montréal Indiens Abenakis (K617, 1995). Unfortunately, the notes give no indication of the origin of the Tewa Mass, but the monophonic vocal melodic line has an accompaniment of electronic piano, drum, and rattles. Christian missions spread the practice of part singing, or singing in harmony, among indigenous groups in North America. For example, two-part singing was introduced to the Abenaki in 1685. By 1699, written reports by French visitors and settlers refer to how beautifully both men's and women's choirs sang in three or even four parts. Some reports even state that Abenaki church singing was better than that heard in France. Most of the remaining tracks of Beautiful Beyond illustrate various forms of two-, three-, or four-part singing introduced by missionaries. Among the most intriguing examples are those sung in Yup'ik based on liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. These consist of unaccompanied recitation in four parts, with the pitches usually changing only near the end of a textual line. Another interesting unaccompanied vocal presentation is that of the Cherokee. These examples show evidence of "southern harmony," a form of church singing that survived in the southeastern United States through camp meetings in the nineteenth century and through publications such as Southern Harmony, whose first edition appeared in 1835 in South Carolina. In southern harmony style, the unaccompanied singers split into three or four parts, with the melody sung by the tenor voices. Often, one part of the choir will make a response, while the remainder sustains a three- or four-note chord. Portions sung by a soloist make this style somewhat more reminiscent of the Native-modeled [End Page 356] renditions discussed at the beginning of this review. Unfortunately, the liner notes often do not give details about the instrumental accompaniments that are occasionally used. These instruments vary from what seems to be an autoharp in track 16, an Oneida version of "Rock of Ages," to organ, guitar, or piano on other tracks. Does Walter Calhoun accompany himself on the banjo for "Guide Me, Jehovah" on track 27? No texts...