Exploring the history of missionary translation of Christian texts in East Asia, Missionary Translators offers a comparative perspective between the features of East Asian languages and the historical context of the translation. Focusing on the Bible and Christian theological works, it looks at the intersection of linguistics, translation studies and history. This book discusses the real-life challenges faced by missionary translators in producing Christian texts in East Asian languages. Students, historians, scholars and those interested in the study of East Asian cultures or translation will find this book to be an insightful and invaluable resource.

"Exploring the history of missionary translation of Christian texts in East Asia, Missionary Translators offers a comparative perspective between the features of East Asian languages and the historical context of the translation. Focusing on the Bible and Christian theological works, it looks at the intersection of linguistics, translation studies, and history. This book discusses the real-life challenges faced by missionary translators in producing Christian texts in East Asian languages. Students, historians, scholars and those interested in the study of East Asian cultures or translation will find this book to be an insightful and invaluable resource"--

Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective “mistranslations.” In particular, this work traces the Angurugu mission from its establishment by the Church Missionary Society in 1943, through Australia’s era of assimilation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, to the introduction of a self-determination policy and bilingual education in 1973. While translation has typically been an instrument of colonization, this book shows that the ambiguities it creates have given Indigenous people opportunities to reinterpret colonization’s position in their lives. Laura Rademaker combines oral history interviews with careful archival research and innovative interdisciplinary findings to present a fresh, cross-cultural perspective on Angurugu mission life. Exploring spoken language and sound, the translation of Christian scripture and songs, the imposition of English literacy, and Aboriginal singing traditions, she reveals the complexities of the encounters between the missionaries and Aboriginal people in a subtle and sophisticated analysis. Rademaker uses language as a lens, delving into issues of identity and the competition to name, own, and control. In its efforts to shape the Anindilyakwa people’s beliefs, the Church Missionary Society utilized language both by teaching English and by translating Biblical texts into the native tongue. Yet missionaries relied heavily on Anindilyakwa interpreters, whose varied translation styles and choices resulted in an unforeseen Indigenous impact on how the mission’s messages were received. From Groote Eylandt and the peculiarities of the Australian settler-colonial context, Found in Translation broadens its scope to cast light on themes common throughout Pacific mission history such as assimilation policies, cultural exchanges, and the phenomenon of colonization itself. This book will appeal to Indigenous studies scholars across the Pacific as well as scholars of Australian history, religion, linguistics, anthropology, and missiology.

This is a modern-spelling version of the 14th century middle english translation by John Wycliffe and John Purvey, the first complete english vernacular version, with an introduction by Terence P. Noble. Also contains a glossary, endnotes, conclusion and bibliography.

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 Shangti as the semantic equivalent of Deus, he made one of the most innovative cross-cultural missionary translations. Ricci's employment of Shangti was neither a simple rewording of a Chinese term nor the use of a loan-word, but was indeed a risk-taking «identification» of the Christian God with the Confucian Most-High, Shangti. Strange Names of God investigates the historical progress of the semantic configuration of Shangti as the divine name of the Christian God in China by focusing on Chinese intellectuals' reaction to the strangely translated Chinese name of God.

For Christians from New Testament times on, the Bible has almost everywhere been a translated Bible. For eighteen centuries it was normally translated into new languages by native speakers, but with the beginning of the nineteenth century and the modern missionary movement came a burst of missionary translation around the world. As missionary churches were established and as societies worldwide were affected by the gospel, people studied the translations, preached from them, and recounted stories to their children. In many societies these translations were the foundation for Christian communities, for theology (including indigenous theologies), and a powerful stimulus to modernization and even secularization reaching beyond the Christian community.Smalley contends that the theological presuppositions of these missionary translators varied widely. He argues that some missionary translators were insightful scholars who probed deeply into the languages and cultures in which they were working; others were unable to transcend the perspective their own culture prescribed for them. Earlier missionaries did not always have a clearly formulated theory of translation or an understanding of what they were doing and why. Eventually, however, a theoretical model was developed, a model that the majority of translators (both missionary and nonmissionary) now use. Smalley maintains that the task of Bible translation is now passing out of the hands of missionaries and back into the hands of native speakers, casting the missionary translator into significantly changed roles in the translation process.