Cultural translation as multidirectional process - Roberto Nobili as missionary translator between cultures, religions and institutions

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Antje Flüchter
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404354152

During the first funding period of our project, we developed an analytical toolkit that operationalized approaches developed in translation studies (using Nida, Lefevere and Venuti) to examine cultural translation. We applied it to several Jesuit texts, written and published for different audiences. Giulia Nardini applied it to the Ñana Upadesam by Roberto Nobili (1577-1656): It is a theological-catechetical text written in Tamil, not translated and hardly researched. Antje Flüchter contextualized Nobili’s translation with Jesuit texts about other parts of the world and published for a European audience. We proved how the Jesuits used multidirectional strategies depending on the situation and audience. Power relations were important, but they led to a complex net of entangled domestication and ascription of strangeness (foreignization). Moreover, the different translation strategies revealed different kinds of transcultural phenomena and enabled us to start a morphology of transculturality.On the basis of these results, we want to expand our research parameters in two important ways in the second phase. First, we want to test our toolkit on additional texts to contextualise Nobili’s translation. Nardini will focus on Tamil texts written by H. Henriques (1520-1600) and Portuguese texts written by G. Fernandes (1541-1619). Both men preceded Nobili in South India: but whereas Henriques’ work provided an aid for Nobili, Fernandes’s work represented the opposition to Nobili’s ideas in the Rites controversy. In parallel, Flüchter will contextualise the Jesuits’ Indian experience by examining published texts from Ethiopia and Canada, two encounters quite different from the South Indian missions. In Canada, the Jesuits worked among First Nations in the Great Lakes region, far away from the French colonial powers. In Ethiopia they met Christians different than those in Europe. Second, on a methodological level, we want to integrate elements of practice theory into our toolkit. Translation and social practice are doubly related: translation is a practice in itself and social practices in every cultural encounter had to be translated. We want to apply the enhanced toolkit to our sources on three modes of social differentiation (gender, social status, dimensions of holiness) and build an intersectional perspective to analyse the Jesuit perception of Indian and other societies and the interaction with them. The focus on practices also promises to reveal hitherto unheard voices of indigenous actors. Most of all, we want to unravel the relation between translating practices and the practice of translation, to trace the negotiation of transcultural practices in missionary encounter and to understand the relation between the local Jesuit translators and the global shaping of Catholic Orthodoxy. Thus, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the missionary context and can better appreciate the dialectic between micro and macro levels in the history of Christianity

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2130: Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Times