1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion is the first to bring together an extensive interdisciplinary engagement with the multiple ways in which the concepts and practices of translation and religion intersect.
The book engages a number of scholarly disciplines in conversation with each other, including the study of translation and interpreting, religion, philosophy, anthropology, history, art history, and area studies. A range of leading and emerging international specialists critically engage with changing understandings of the key categories ‘translation’ and ‘religion’ as discursive constructs, thus contributing to the development of a new field of academic study, translation and religion. The 28 contributions, divided into six parts, analyze how translation constructs ideas, texts, or objects as ‘sacred’ or for ‘religious purposes’, often in competition with what is categorized as ‘non-religious.’ The part played by faith communities is treated as integral to analyses of the role of translation and religion. It investigates how or why translation functions in re-constructing and transforming religion(s) and for whom and examines a range of ‘sacred texts’ in translation— from the written to the spoken, manuscript to print, paper to digital, architectural form to objects of sacred art, intersemiotic scriptural texts, and where commentary, exegesis and translation interweave.
This Handbook is an indispensable scholarly resource for researchers in translation studies and the study of religions.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Hephzibah Israel
PART I Disciplinary Frameworks
1 Religion, Translation, Semantics
Mark Q. Gardiner and Steven Engler
2 Untranslatability and the Canonical Text
Theo Hermans
3 Translating the Sacred Books of the East: Friedrich Max Müller and the Orient
Arie L. Molendijk
4 ‘An Equivocal Position’: Anthropology, Evans- Pritchard, and the Spirit of Translation
Michael Edwards
5 The Religion of Translation
Gil Anidjar
PART II Concepts, Approaches and Methods
6 Interface of the Deep: Design Cues for Engaging New Media and Machine Translation with Religious Scriptures
Timothy Beal
7 Interpreting and Religion
Olgierda Furmanek
8 Collaborative Translation and the Transmission of Buddhism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Robert Neather
9 Women, Sacred Texts, Translation
Rim Hassen and Adriana Şerban
10 Paratexts and Sacred Translation: The Noble Qur’an in English
Yazid Haroun
11 On Mantras and Other 'Untranslatable' Forms of Religious Language 1
Robert A. Yelle
PART III Inter- semiotic Translation and Religion: Materiality, Performance and Experiencing the Sacred
12 Bodies of Words: Translating Sacred Text into Sacred Architecture in East Asian Buddhism
Halle O’Neal and Paul Harrison
13 Conceptional and Intersemiotic Transpositions: Between Autochthonous Latin American Religions
Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo
14 Translating Sikh Scripture and Sikh Lifeworlds
Arvind- Pal Singh Mandair and Puninder Singh
15 Materializing Jesus’ Nazareth: Translation as Imagineering
James S. Bielo
PART IV Translation and Competing Religious Cultures
16 From Sumerian into Akkadian: Translations, Sacred Texts and Canonicity in Ancient Mesopotamia
Stefano Seminara
17 Greek Texts in Arabic Translations: Quranic Language, Christian Translators, and Muslim Audiences
Elvira Wakelnig
18 Jesuit Translation: The Ciceronian Legacy
Karen Bennett
19 Sacred Tongue, Translated People: Translation in the Jewish Tradition
Naomi Seidman
20 Translation and the Construction of Conversion Narratives: Language Strategies of Russian Converts to Islam
Gulnaz Sibgatullina
PART V Religions in New Contexts: Translation and Construction
21 Straddling the Himalayas: Translating Buddhism into Chinese
Daniel Boucher
22 Bahá’Í Translation in Early Twentieth- Century China: A Historical Survey and Critical Issues
HE Quinghui and WAN Zhaoyuan
23 Translating Sacred Scriptures: The Śvetāmbara Jain Tradition
Nalini Balbir
24 Grammar and Art of Translation as Expressions of Muslim Faith: Translational Practices in West Africa
Dmitry Bondarev
PART VI Translating Sacred Texts: Critical Perspectives from Translators
25 Simultaneous Interpreting in a Pentecostal Church: Encountering the Sacred
Sari Hokkanen
26 Reflecting Infinities: Translating the Zohar’s Sacred Revelations
David Solomon
27 The Ramayana in Translation
Philip Lutgendorf
28 Translating Sikh Scripture: Rebounding Sound and Sense
Nikky- Guninder Kaur Singh
Index
Biography
Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the author of Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (2011).
'This Handbook marks a watershed in the study of translation and the sacred. Bringing together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, the volume offers an unprecedented array of approaches to a field that has traditionally been dominated by the Christian Bible. The chapters treat various faith traditions, interpreting as well as translation, new technologies, intersemiotic translation, as well as previously unexplored contexts of translation. In its breadth and sophistication, the handbook makes an enormous and very welcome contribution to Translation Studies, Religious Studies, and a host of related disciplines.'
Brian James Baer, Professor of Russian and Translation Studies, Kent State University, USA
'Finally, we have a much-needed single volume on the complexity and beauty of translating sacred texts. Written by the finest scholars in the field,…this volume will be required by anyone faced with the awesome task of sacred translation, and the …significance of translated materials.'
Mark Juergensmeyer, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Global Studies, Sociology, and affiliate of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and co-translator of Songs of the Saints of India.
