Abstract
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion, published in 2023, is the latest volume in the series Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies. It was edited by Hephzibah Israel, senior lecturer in translation studies at the University of Edinburgh. Apart from Israel’s introduction, the volume consists of twenty-eight chapters by scholars from various fields (translation studies, religious studies, biblical studies, cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, Asian languages, English, Assyriology), with a concluding section by three professional translators and one interpreter. The different scholarly fields clearly testify to the cross-disciplinary nature of the volume. This makes for exciting and novel explorations of many themes.
The editor’s introduction is followed by six main parts: (1) “Disciplinary frameworks,” (2) “Concepts, approaches and methods,” (3) “Inter-semiotic translation and religion: Materiality, performance and experiencing the sacred,” (4) “Translation and competing religious cultures,” (5) “Religions in new contexts: Translation and construction,” and (6) “Translating sacred texts: Critical perspectives from translators.” The handbook thus progresses from more fundamental questions on concepts of religion, semantics, canon(s), (un)translatability, and the role of translation in the crafting of sacred texts themselves, through methods from digital media and themes such as collaborative translation, gender, paratexts, and the different forms of religious language, into studies in multimodal and intersemiotic forms of religious translation, and finally to case studies on translation in competing religious cultures and in new contexts.
It is impossible to cover all aspects of this rich handbook in a single review. Let me discuss some of its features and some of the contributions in more detail. I would like to begin with noting that the volume, perhaps a bit ironically from the perspective of The Bible Translator and its readers, “aims to move the conversation beyond Bible translation” (3). Israel notes that the discipline of translation studies, in tracing its origins to the Dutch-American scholar James S. Holmes rather than to Eugene Nida, has tried to “shake off the baggage of its long association with Bible translation in particular and religion(s) in general” (3). The work of Nida has thus perhaps been more associated with biblical translation as a highly specialized (sub)discipline, rather than with mainstream translation studies. In my view, the present handbook should be viewed as an outcome of the cultural and social turn in the discipline in the 1990s and early 2000s, and it is such a scholarly interest that has finally placed religious translation as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon in translation studies, a development to which the handbook testifies.
In the introduction, Israel sets out to deconstruct the two key terms of the handbook’s title: translation and religion. To begin with translation, Israel immediately distances herself from the notion of translation as the mechanical transfer of fixed meaning(s) across languages. In other words, together with a large part of contemporary translation studies scholars, she debunks the idea of translational equivalence between source text and target text (or, as in the case of Nida, between the effect of the source text and the effect of the target text). Translation does not replace or replicate texts, it transforms texts and meanings (2). Israel defines translation as both an act and a conceptual category, in constant negotiation with the different contexts in which it is enacted. Therefore, translation is never a given. The debunking of the concept of equivalence should give food for thought to Bible translators. Israel goes on to note that the term religion has been, and continues to be, notoriously hard to define (the use of the term especially in comparative religion has close connections to the construction of “world religions,” discussed by Arie L. Molendijk in his chapter on Max Müller’s multi-volume anthology Sacred Books of the East, compiled at the end of the nineteenth century). Israel underscores that this is actually one of the reasons for including it in the handbook’s title, along with the term translation: thereby, attention is drawn “to the constructed character of the term religion,” and also to “the part played by translation” in how religion has been constructed (5). Israel proceeds by discussing specifically the intersection of translation and religion, noting that there has been until recently scant interest in translation in religious studies, and equally scant interest in religion in translation studies (perhaps owing to the initial distancing in the discipline from religious/biblical translation). Again, the appearance of the handbook at this point in time is an indication that something is changing.
As already noted, the handbook represents a number of different perspectives and research interests. This naturally also means that all readers of the handbook will not be interested in the same topics and themes. Let me therefore now discuss a few of the contributions more in-depth, contributions that to my mind could be particularly interesting for the readers of The Bible Translator. These contributions are quite evenly distributed over the different sections of the handbook (see above): they are both more conceptual, methodological, and theoretical approaches, as well as more case-study-based investigations of specific religious texts and traditions. For example, Timothy Beal’s fascinating contribution “Interface of the deep” discusses how AI and machine translation can be used to produce translations of the Hebrew Bible. Beal’s team expected that the machine they had trained would produce widely differing translations, reflecting the different interpretive possibilities inherent in the Hebrew text(s), but the opposite actually happened: the machine produced twenty translations (of the Shema) that were close to identical. This was an outcome of the fact that the machine had been trained on a corpus of existing English translations, which illustrates how close to each other these actually are, linguistically speaking. (Beal traces this resemblance back to the 1560 Geneva Bible.) This phenomenon should be familiar for a translator of the Bible who has to grapple with the influence of existing versions and translations.
Most translators of the Bible will be involved in different forms of collaborative translation. This phenomenon is discussed by Robert Neather in his contribution on “Collaborative translation and the transmission of Buddhism.” Next, the issue of inclusive translation and the wider ramifications of gender-sensitive issues is a topic for discussion in Rim Hassen’s and Adriana Şerban’s contribution, “Women, sacred texts, translation,” where they discuss how “gender roles within religious traditions are legitimised or challenged through a range of translation strategies” (152). The interesting cases in point stem from the work of women translators of the Qur’an, the Tanak, and the Christian Bible. Qur’an translation is also the subject of Yazid Haroun’s contribution, “Paratexts and sacred translation: The Noble Qur’an in English,” where Haroun discusses a contemporary Saudi translation of the Qur’an and especially how the institutional patronage has impacted the paratextual framing of the translated text. In the part on inter-semiotic and multimodal translation, James Bielo carries out a highly innovative investigation of how the birth town of Jesus, Nazareth, is “translated” in an exhibition in the Museum of the Bible (Washington, DC). In part 4, “Translation and competing religious cultures,” we find several interesting contributions. The most noteworthy piece here is Karen Bennet’s absolutely fascinating “Jesuit translation: The Ciceronian legacy,” on the Jesuits’ missionary strategy of accommodating (or “domesticating”) the Christian message to different target cultures (for example Asian and American). This was made possible by “secularizing” concepts in the target languages by interpreting them in terms of “culture,” whereby they could be used in translation by the Jesuits without risking accusations of heresy. Bennet contends that hereby, the Jesuits actually “proved to be a progressive force which contributed to the secularization of European society” (328). In the same section, we also find contributions by Elvira Wakelnig on Greek texts in Arab translation for Muslim audiences in the eighth to eleventh centuries, and by Naomi Seidman on “Translation in Jewish tradition.” While interesting and well-written, Seidman’s contribution to my mind constructs too rigid a dichotomy between Jewish and Christian translation: the former is allegedly interested in “the materiality of the signifier” (343), and the latter in the signified (the message of the texts). Seidman then connects the former to advances in poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Framed this way, Christian translation can only be on the losing side.
The next part, “Religions in new contexts,” contains four contributions concerning the translation of Buddhist texts into Chinese, Bahá’í translation in China, translation in the Indian Jain tradition, and Muslim translational practices in West Africa in the seventeenth century. As noted above, the last section concludes the handbook with contributions from three professional translators and one interpreter. All in all, this handbook makes for a highly stimulating read. I have tried to describe the rich contents of the book, with some emphasis on the contributions which I believe would be particularly interesting for a person working on biblical translation (whether as a scholar or as a translator). Still, I would urge such a reader to also digest some of the chapters that deal with other traditions and texts. To my mind, the great benefit of this handbook lies in the overall comparative perspective that the contributions together make up. This does not entail any specific point of comparison (for example, how this or that practice is different from biblical translation), but the contributions mutually highlight each other and together form a celebration of difference. Precisely the overall comparative perspective should make this handbook a resource that is perhaps not primarily useful for a translator of the Bible; rather, it provides rich material for reflecting on the conditions for translating religious texts in different contexts—both now and in the past.