CAN RELIGIOUS TEXTS BE TRANSLATED

These transformations from part of a much longer history of translation within Christianity that has spurred extensive controversy. Can sacred texts be translated? Can a divine language be translated into a human one? Does translation assist or impede the spread of religious?

This debate has produced a continuum of positions stretching from an insistence that the divine cannot be translated to an equally enthusiastic assertion that it can. The first position is associated with Islam wherein Arabic, the language in which an angel dictated the Koran, is deemed to be the most superior version in which to encounter the sacred text. Translations are not disallowed but are seen as lesser than the Arabic. The position of the Catholic Church (until 1962), which held that the Bible was best read in Latin, represents a not dissimilar position.

By contrast, Protestants, particularly those of an evangelical stripe, have been ardent translators (Sanneh 1991). These evangelical versions of translation generally go hand in hand with the idea of translation as revelation. In this view, translation becomes possible as God will ensure that his meaning infuses the new version. A second Protestant view is more modest and holds that translation is a human activity prone to error and dependent on human decisions and interpretations (Engelke 2007: 22-3).

Questions of translation enrich the methodological field of religious textual inquiry. One focus is obviously on the source and the target text to see what orders of understanding the linguistic and the stylistic choices of the translation do or do not enable. Outside the text, we need to ask how translation is actually done and what ideas about translation the participants hold. Finally as translation studies indicate, we need to consider broader political questions to ask how ideas of equivalence or non-equivalence come into being. Whether texts are seen as faithful renditions of one another depends not only on the quality of the translation but on a broader political willingness to believe in the commensurability of people, ideas, and cultures (Liu 1999).

To see how these issue worked in practice, we turn to the translation of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a key of evangelical Protestantism often considered a second Bible by Nonconformists and widely translated by missionaries drawn from their ranks.