Cultural Translation as a Multidirectional Process in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission

Abstract

In the seventeenth-century missionary context of South India, the Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) engaged in a multi-directional process of translation, translating his Catholic mission, doctrine, and literature for a Tamil audience and adapting it to local Tamil beliefs, practices, and literature for the Roman Catholic context. Adopting theories from translation studies (Frege, Nida, Lefevere and Venuti), this paper suggests a model of “cultural translation” not only as a metaphor but as an analytical tool. Straddling the binary notion of orthodoxy-unorthodoxy, this mechanism pursues two goals: (1) it uncovers the role of translations in the construction of religions and social identities; (2) it applies the theoretical framework of “cultural translation” to illuminate the historical context of Jesuit missions in India and beyond. In doing so, it contributes to the analysis of transculturality and challenges the traditional master narrative of a homogeneous Christianity.