Religions in Translation

In my Feast of St. Jerome post last September 30, I complained that religious translation wasn’t given the important place it deserved in contemporary translation studies.

Now, from that wellspring of TS literature, St. Jerome Publishing, comes a call for contributions to a special issue of their journal The Translator that will be devoted to Religions in Translation: Issues of Censorship and Identity. The call rightly begins,

Translation has been central to the way religions have travelled across languages and cultures. It has introduced religions to new cultures, led to conversions and to the establishment of communities of new religious adherents.

Certainly censorship is a topic of clear historical relevance here in Spain, where the infamous Inquisition banned all Spanish translations of the Bible for over 200 years lest they stray from the official Roman Catholic interpretation enshrined in the Latin Vulgate. More widely, Christian and other sects and churches everywhere have the translations that they use - over 2,000 years of them - as part of their identity.

The special issue will be guest edited by Hephzibah Israel of the UK Open University and the University of Delhi. But we’ll have to wait until well into 2012 to read it.

CONTACT
Dr. Hephzibah Israel, hepisrael@yahoo.co.uk