Felicity Jensz
Imperial Reach Through Bible Translations in Nineteenth Century German East Africa
Citation: Jensz, F. (2025). Imperial Reach Through Bible Translations in Nineteenth Century German East Africa. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2508271
Link to open access journal: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2025.2508271#abstract
Abstract: Informed by an attention to global and transnational entanglements, 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. 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 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.
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The Holy Word Factory: Translation, Syncretism, Language Ideology, and Colonial Language Dynamics at the Crossroads of Religion and Empire
by Floris Solleveld.
Global Intellectual History (March 2025) 1-38. doi:10.1080/23801883.2025.2470865.
Abstract
The Protestant missionary movement played a key role in colonial language dynamics and conceptual change, and one way in which it did so was through translation. The process of registering and standardizing languages for the sake of missionary translation was a global phenomenon that acquired industrial proportions in the 19th century with mass-produced catechisms, primers, and cheap Bibles and Gospels. This article is concerned with these colonial language dynamics, the underlying language ideologies, and the cultural consequences. In particular, it discusses four cases: 1) the Māori language with its strongly regimented oral traditions and centuries of development in isolation; 2) the complex patchwork of languages, writing systems, overlapping religious traditions, and social-linguistic hierarchies in Dutch Indonesia; 3) the Surinamese Creole language Sranan Tongo, one of the first creoles to be studied and written down; and 4) the 1940 BFBS conference on African languages.
Keywords: cultural translation, colonial language dynamics, religious syncretism, language ideology, colonial knowledge, missionary linguistics
The Colonial Bible in Australia: Scripture translations by Biraban and Lancelot Threlkeld, 1825-1859.
by Hilary M. Carey
This book provides an extended introduction to the scripture translations of Biraban, an Awabakal man, and the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld into the Hunter River Lake Macquarie Language (HRLM), the first scripture translations into any Australian language. For historical purposes, it includes a copy of the unique standalone edition of the HRLM 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 you can purchase one from Amazon.
Blubber for Bibles: translating colonialism in Inuit missions, c. 1750–1850
by Hilary M. Carey
Polar Record 60 (2024): e15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247424000093.
Between 1750 and 1850, at least twenty versions of the Greenlandic Bible were published through the efforts of Greenlandic catechists, Danish Lutherans, German Moravians, the Danish Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). This article assesses the role of Greenlandic and other Inuit translators as they were engaged in the colonial project of devising a complete version of the scriptures in their own language. Using the relatively untapped correspondence of the BFBS, it considers how and why the status of Inuit translators changed over the course of the missionary translation project. In one response to the reception of new Bibles, Inuit people offered gifts of blubber to the BFBS to support translations for other mission communities.
Ludwig Adzaklo (b. 1882): Pioneer Bible Translator, Teacher, and Catechist’. JACB 9, no. 2–3 (2024):19–27.
This biographical publication on Adzaklo, an indigenous West African Bible translator, aims to decolonise and repatriate colonial knowledge on indigenous agency which was integral to the global Bible movement of the 19th century.
Unsung Heroes of Mission Bible Translation in Colonial West Africa: Ludwig Adzaklo of the Bremen Mission in German Togoland
by Dr. Michael Wandusim
Religions 2024, 15(3), 314; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15030314
This publication emerges from our GloBil West African case study, makes a significant contribution to a re-assessment of the status and role of indigenous Bible translators in missionary Bible translation in colonial West Africa.