NIDA LECTURE: Ethics in Bible Translation: Considerations of Equivalence, Space and Structures

Details

Year: 2025

Track(s):

Plenary

Resources

Abstract

My talk will draw on translation studies debates on ethics in translation to address themes and issues in Bible translation. Questions of ethics have featured in the discourse on Bible translation in one way or other in the past and continue to do so in the present. However, ethics is not a universal category or consideration and it is important to take into account that definitions and understandings of what should be considered ethical change from one historical period and cultural space to another. I will bring two overlapping aspects of Bible translation history to bear on the other—a consideration of the conceptual along with processes and implementation—that is, how do approaches to translational equivalence relate to the multiple and competing structures that make Bible translation possible in the first place? Using examples primarily from South Asia but also from various other locations of Bible translation from across the globe, my talk will encompass the history of the proliferation of the translated Bible outside Europe from the early eighteenth-century onwards, to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will end with some questions of ethics for consideration for the future of Bible translation scholarship and translators.

About the Author

Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies The University of Edinburgh

Hephzibah’s research intersects translation, religion, history, and postcolonial studies. She has a keen interest in the way ideas, texts or objects considered sacred are translated across language cultures and history. She retains a strong research interest in South Asian literary and translation cultures.

At the University of Edinburgh, she teaches translation theory and methods at the postgraduate level with a focus on literary and sacred text translation. Before joining Edinburgh, she taught Literary Studies at the Open University's London Region and at the University of Delhi at St. Stephen College (1996-1997) and Lady Shri Ram College (1997-2009) in India. She has trained PhD students at the Translation Research Summer School and NIDA School of Translation Studies over several summers and taught on Erasmus Exchange programmes in Europe and India.

She holds postgraduate degrees in English Literature from the University of Delhi and specialized in translation studies as a Felix doctoral scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her doctoral research focused on the Tamil Bible as a text that was born out of debates on translation, language use, literature and religions in colonial south India.

She authored Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (2011), a monograph analyzing the translated Tamil Bible as an object of cultural transfer in South Asia in the context of evolving attitudes to translation in the Tamil sacred landscapes from the eighteenth century onwards. More recently, she has edited the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion (2023). She has guest edited (with Matthias Frenz) a special issue on ‘Religion and Translation’ (2019) for the journal Religion and a special issue entitled ‘Translation in India: Multilingual practices and cultural histories of texts’ (Translation Studies 2021). She is chair of the editorial board of the book series, Approaches to Translation Studies (Brill) and co-edits the book series, Creative, Social and Transnational Perspectives on Translation (Routledge). Her multilingual poetry on translation and border-crossings was exhibited at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, June-September 2023.