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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
