Page 221 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

204 Isabel Hofmeyr

(rather than via the tainted agency of the missionaries) and was conferred
miraculously on believers by angels in dreams and visions (Hofmeyr 2006).
In a very different instance, the Friday Masowe Church in Zimbabwe refuses
to use the Bible because they receive the Word “live and direct” as they say
from the Holy Spirit (Engelke 2007).

Can religious texts be translated?
These transformations form 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 religions?
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 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 issues worked in practice, we turn to the translation of
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a key text of evangelical Protestantism
often considered a second Bible by Nonconformists and widely translated by
missionaries drawn from their ranks.