As part of the SPP sub-project “Translation as a Practice – Translating Practices. Roberto Nobili as A Missionary Translator between Culture, Religion, and Societies” an workshop organized by Antje Flüchter (antje.fluechter@uni-bielefeld.de) and Giula Nardini (giulia.nardini@uni-bielefeld.de) on the topic “Translation of gender roles in the early modern Christian missionary context” will take place at Bielefeld University from June 21–22, 2024.
The workshop will focus on the translation of gender roles and the construction of transcultural gender concepts related to local concepts and practices, in the Christian missionary context in the early modern period. How did the missionaries translate the gender roles, for example the concept of femininity and masculinity, the conception of body, the sexual norms, purity and virginity? How did the missionaries translate the institution and the ritual of marriage in the missions? How did the missionary translate the figure of the Virgin Mary and her veneration?
By focusing on missionary translation, the workshop opens a new perspective on the creative encounter between missionaries and the religious other, including the vast majority of those who rejected conversion. Its the aim to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars whose research focuses on all four corners of the globe: Asia, the Americas and the Pacific, Africa, Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Europe.
As part of the SPP sub-project “Early Modern Cultures of Translation in Wales: Innovations and Continuities” of the DFG Priority Programme 2130 “Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450–1800)”, the Department of English, American & Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn is organizing the international conference “Contents of Faith in Transfer: Texts and Contexts of Early Modern Catechism Translations” from 27–28 June 2024
In the context of the various Early Modern evangelizing endeavours within and outside of Europe, which aimed to propagate (competing) varieties of Christianity for religious or power-political reasons, catechisms played an important role.
Due to the denominational differentiation within European Christianity in the wake of the Reformation, but also in the context of the missionary work among non-Christian communities and also with regard to different target audiences, there emerged a diversity of texts with quite different circumstances of production. Since these instructional texts were translated into a wide range of local languages and were disseminated in print, they are a rewarding source for the comparative study of aspects and methods of cultural translation. There will be particular focus on the question whether and which differences exist with regard to the translation strategies within the different contexts (inter alia, edification and instruction of an audience adhering to Christian religion already for quite some time vs. mission in non-Christian cultures). Attention will be given both to renderings into smaller European languages and to translations into languages spoken outside of Europe produced in the course of worldwide missionary contexts from the 16th until the 18th century: thus, there are to be contributions on catechism translations into Celtic and Baltic languages, Basque, Yiddish, Greenlandic, Ukrainian, Japanese, Tamil and Zapotec. The speakers from the SPP 2130 include Antje Flüchter, Giulia Nardini, Johannes Müller, Martina Schrader-Kniffki and Katja Triplett.