Felicity Jensz has published an open-access article in the Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History on bible translation in late-nineteenth century German East Africa. The archival work of this paper was undertaken in the Unitätsarchiv in Herrnhut, Germany, as well as the Archives of the British & Foreign Bible Society at Cambridge University Library, a GloBil project partner.
This article examines the context and process of bible translations from German East Africa at the tail end of German colonial rule in the early twentieth century. It is informed by an attention to global and transnational entanglements that are evident within the process of bible translations and publications. Translation is always a process of negotiation and compromise, and through examining the processes behind the translation and publication of the Bible into Kinyiha and Kinyamwezi a number of imperial as well as religious tensions become evident. The publication of the Kinyamwezi translation was undertaken quickly in order fend off Catholic and Islam threats to the Protestant efforts of conversion. As with the Kinyamwezi translation, the Kinyiha translation contributed to the field of colonial linguists, which itself underscored broader German colonial governments imperial agendas.
Map of the Moravian missions in German East Africa around 1900. Mbozi is indicated by a red ‘H’ in the top left-hand corner on the map, on the River Nkana. Source: Periodical accounts relating to the foreign missions of the Church of the United Brethren, 1900, vol. 04, no. 41, Map.
The named translator of the Nyiha New Testament (as it was called), was a Moravian missionary by the name of Traugott Bachmann. The article demonstrates that through focusing on the historical setting of, and contributors to, colonial bible translations new insights into the political, cultural, religious, and economic tensions across imperial borders are gained. Although seldom mentioned in official reports, indigenous translators, women and even children, were of immense importance to the ‘reduction’ and ‘conquering’ of ‘unmastered languages’ beyond the work of colonial and missionary linguists, and thereby also contributed to the imperial reach of European empires. In this article through extensive archival research a number of indigenous translators were able to be identified and named. This article contributes to the broader aims of the GloBil project to decolonise the archives of missionary and bible societies and to highlight the contributes of local people to the broader colonial project of bible translations.
It was the privilege of members of the Global Bible project team to travel to São Paulo for the Yale-Edinburgh conference on the theme for 2025, ‘Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism.’ Approximately 100 delegates from all over the world met to discuss this challenging topic over three days, from 28 – 30 May 2025.
We thank our hosts at the Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo, and the conference team of Pedro Feitoza, Sérgio Santos, Ronaldo Cavalcante, Suzana Coutinho, Adriano Godoy, Erika Helgen, and Helen Teixeira, for their hospitality and excellent organisation.
Photo of delegates from the final session
The journey from Bristol and Muenster to São Paulo was a big undertaking, but we were committed to participating in the first meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh conference in the global south. WIth its remarkable traffic, diverse population of Afro-Brazilian, Japanese and Portuguese heritage, this was the right place to be discussing the impact of colonalism on the Bible translation movement.
Hilary Carey, Ben Weber and Felicity Jensz
For our session, Hilary Carey discussed the progress of the project, and in particular the argument of Adrian Hastings that the creation of a national literature, especially a Bible in the mother tongue of a particular people, was a critical step in the creation of a national consciousness. She discussed this in relation to the case studies from Greenland, Ghana and Australia. While each translation project was a unique intellectual achievement, there was a wide variety of outcomes for the elevation of these Bibles to national significance.
Felicity Jensz’s paper, entitled ‘German Colonialism, the Global Bible and National Identity in the Age of Empire’, focused on micro studies from the German colonial world including the translations in Ewe in Togo, and work on the Duke of York Bible translations. She demonstrated that through a triangulation of sources we have been able to uncover the names and contributions of various local translators in the project of creating a global bible, thus contributing to the decolonisation of knowledge.
Benjamin Weber spoke on the Digital Humanities aspect of our project. He described the process of compiling a project data base from multiple sources to enable a large-view analysis of the spread of the bible translations over the nineteenth century and presented this digital tool.
Having completed our own contribution in the first session, this left us free to enjoy other contributions throughout the conference. Sessions were in both Portuguese and English, with Portugues sessions skillfully translated for the less linguistically adept. In this way we learnt about Christian nationalism in Lain America, and the unique identities created by religious minorities in regions as diverse as Hungary, Malta, and Ghana. Eric Miller introduced me to Milton Nascimento, the wildly popular singer songwriter and voice of Brazil. For the final session, Emma Wild-Wood had the unenviable task of summing up the main themes, and bidding us gather and return for the next Yale-Edinburgh meeting.
In between sessions, we continued to discuss the future of our own project, possible grant developments that can build on what we have done so far, and – with Ben Weber’s help – thinking about developing the Global Bible missionary map using AI to allow plain language queries of our data. We also visited the extraordinary Afro-Brazilian Museum which helped us gained further insight into this exciting city and its colonial heritage.
We are very sorry to be saying goodbye to Floris Solleveld, who has been the postdoctoral research associate working with the Bristol team on the Global Bible project for the last eighteen months.
Floris has made a splendid contribution to the project since joining us in September 2023. Among other tasks, he led on the Translating Colonialism conference, writing the call for papers and helping define its major theme. He has been active in searching out new and exciting archival sources in many, extended trips to archives in the UK, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He has written a series of lively blog posts about these adventures, which you can read on this blog.
He now has a major article forthcoming with Global Intellectual History, which demonstrates his learning and scholarship and the rich possibilities for researchers accessing the linguistic resources of missionary and bible society archives. Look out for that soon.
For the next six months, Floris will be at the University of Amsterdam with a Senior Fellowship from the Vossius Centre for History of the Humanities and Sciences and an Allard Pierson Fellowship at the Amsterdam University Library Special Collections. Within that period he hopes to finish the revised manuscript of his book. In the fall he will be at the Warburg Institute in London with a Frances Yates Short-Term Fellowship.
Farewell Floris – and all the best for your future career.
Last week, international delegates from around the world met for the Translating Colonialism conference at Westminster College, University of Cambridge.
The conference was the major event for the second year of the Global Bible project, and has been over a year in the planning and thinking.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone who joined us for this event!
Delegates to the Translating Colonialism Conference, Westminster College Cambridge, 7-8 November 2024.
Papers were organised into panels which corresponded roughly to geographical and chronological themes, though the range and diversity of topics and approaches was a key feature of the conference.
The conference began with a short presentation by the Global Bible team, both the Münster strand led by Felicity Jensz and Michael Wandusim (who was unfortunately not able to attend) and the Bristol strand, with Hilary Carey, Floris Solleveld, and Mei Mei Cheung. This outlined the origins of the project and its focus on three case study regions in colonial West Africa, Oceania, and the Arctic, but with the conference extending that to include participants presenting on bible translation in China, Russia, India and across a wider time frame, from the early Christian era to the modern day.
For the first panel, Daniel Jeyaraj (Liverpool Hope) and Hepzibah Israel (Edinburgh) took us to Tamil Nadu. Jeyaraj discussed the Danish Lutheran missionaries who undertook the first translations into Tamil in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. Israel analysed the translated bible for its materiality and as an icon for the translation process, with a series of striking illustrations including Bible colporteurs and Bible women in colonial India.
Delegates reviewing the drawings by Manfred Wkeng Aseng at the Translating Colonialism conference.
The second panel included a number of technological challenges and included a presentation from Benjamin Weber on behalf of the Münster digital humanities team on the missionary map. The missionary map is one of the outputs from the Global Bible project, building on an initial template from the Book of a Thousand Tongues, edited by Eric North (1938) and later by Eugene Nida (1972), with permission from the United Bible Society. There was a lively discussion of aspects of the map as a tool for future researchers, with valuable contributions made by Neil Rees (United Bible Society).
Two artistic commissions followed this presentation. Leeza Awojobi, a Bristol-based poet and storyteller, provided a poem and video reflection on the heritage of her family, originally from the former German colony of Cameroon and her ‘lost’ mother tongue of Kpwe (Mokpwe). This was followed by the work of the New Guinea artist Manfred Wkeng Aseng, and the coming of Anglican missions to his home place of Kaironk in the highlands, depicted using traditional images.
Manfred Wkeng Aseng, drawing of his brother’s travels from Kaironk in the PNG highlands (bottom right corner) to Simbai, Madang, Popendetta and St Paul’s and St Peter’s cathedral in Dogura (top right corner).
Onesimus Ngundu, for Cambridge University Library, presented on the library and archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society. This was followed by presentations on aspects of translation from two different times and perspectives: Tyler Horton (Cambridge) on strategies for translating the Hebrew term ruah (רוּחַ) ( ‘wind’ ‘breath’ ‘spirit’) in the Septuagint, and Uchenna Oyali (Abuja) on the changing meaning of nsọ (‘holiness’/ sacred/ unclean), a word with both positive and negative connotations, in Igbo bible translation.
For the final session of the day, Brian Stanley (Edinburgh) analysed the meaning of the term ‘heathen’ and questioned whether the derogatory connotations of this term had any real world impact on the social demarcation of race in colonial societies. Laura Rademaker (ANU, Canberra) took us to post-colonial era in supposedly decolonised Australia. Through her analysis of the bilingual school policy in the Northern Territory she noted the long tail of missionary education, which persisted long after the formal work of missions in settler countries had passed. Mia Jacobs (Bristol) analysed the meaning of biblical references to menstruation in Leviticus and the woman with the twelve-year flow (Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5:25-34; Luke 8:43-48) to question pejorative interpretations of the status of menstruation in both the ancient world and today.
We enjoyed an excellent conference dinner at Galleria in Cambridge – readying us for another day of talks.
De Valera Botchway (Cape Coast) led the morning discussion with a challenge to understand the full meaning of traditional religious terms, as they were translated into new biblical contexts. His example was the Tiwi (Akan) term nyamesom pa which he argued was mistranslated to mean ‘religion’ as a practice set apart from other parts of life. He argued that traditionally there was no such distinction, and that translation into a western idiom undercut older life- and knowledge-ways. John Ekem (Accra) examined the earliest mother tongue translaters of the bible on the Gold Coast through the work of Christian Protten and Jacobus Capitein. He argued that they were more than translaters but necessarily acted as cultural mediators providing dynamic interpretations of language to meet the new needs of the times. Toon van Hal (Leuven), analysing the compilation of translations of the Lord’s Prayer, explained that this practice reflected in miniature the global bible project, and provided insights into the developing understanding of global languages, and the relationship between scholarly and mission-driven linguistics.
For the sixth panel, Holger Strutwolf (Münster) returned us to the earliest centuries of Christianity, pointing out through a rich selection of examples, that issues of translation and the editing of scripture are not new but are inherent in the transmission of scripture into new languages. In two complementary papers, Lisa Kerl (Münster) examined the role of German-speaking missionaries and the challenge of translating the bible into classical Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Anastasia Akulich (Leeds) considered the work of Russian Orthodox missionaries and their close engagement with Chinese Orthodox Christians and the extent to which the latter were effectively independent agents in the work of translation.
James Wyld. The World: designed to show the languages and dialects into which the BFBS has translated the scriptures. 2nd ed, 1841
The final session brought together papers from the two global bible project teams. Floris Solleveld outlined how the global translation project of the BFBS and affiliated societies resulted in a virtual as well as a physical world map of languages, as well as in massive repositories of linguistic data. Felicity Jensz examined the connections between German and British Bible Societies in colonial West Africa, highlighting the significant achievement and contribution of mother tongue translators to the present day. Finally, Judith Becker provided a summing up and review of the proceedings across two days of intense discussion.
The final activity for delegates was to take the short walk to Cambridge University Library to visit a display of items from the British and Foreign Bible Society. Selected by Floris Solleveld, these highlighted the work of Indigenous and mother tongue translators from many cultures, as well as archival and printed objects showing the history and progress of individual bible translation projects, as well as the 1841 copy of Wyld’s Map of the world, with all the languages into which the BFBS had translated the bible.
Hilary Carey has published a new book with LangSci Press:
The Colonial Bible in Australia: Scripture translations by Biraban and Lancelot Threlkeld, 1825-1859.
This book provides an extended introduction to the scripture translations of Biraban, an Awabakal man, and the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld. It examines Threlkeld’s linguistic field work in Raiatea prior to coming to New South Wales. It places the translations he undertook in the context of Australian missionary linguistics and the rapid advance of the settler frontier, for which he was a key eyewitness. It analyses the motivation and collaboration between Biraban and Threlkeld in the light of discoveries of new manuscripts, including that of the Gospel of St Matthew, as well as Threlkeld’s personal diary, neither of which have previously been analysed. The review includes a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of the complete corpus of Biraban and Threlkeld’s collaboration. It includes a complete list of the Threlkeld manuscripts and the many printed editions, including those available online. For historical purposes, it includes a copy of the unique standalone edition of the Gospel of Saint Luke, presented by the editor, James Fraser, to the British and Foreign Bible Society. The original is now in Cambridge University Library. It also includes a full digitisation of Threlkeld’s autograph manuscript, illuminated by Annie Layard, in Auckland City Library.
You can download a pdf completely free from LangSci Press.
Alternatively, if you would like a hard copy in order to enjoy the facsimile editions of the John Fraser edition of Biraban and Threlkeld’s Gospel of Saint Luke, or the original manuscript, written by Threlkeld and illuminated by Annie Layard, you can buy a copy from Amazon. Just follow the link.
