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Blog Archives

Translation and Religion: the three days

The three days went so quick that it was time to say our goodbyes before we knew it. This indicates of course just how engaged we were discussing the themes of the conference, each others’ research papers and sharing meals. We had a rich combination of presentations addressing translation in a range of religions, languages and regions. It was a great opportunity to compare notes and to see what similarities and differences we could identity in each other’s research area. One thing was clear, we needed more research in this area and, as far as possible, across more languages and religions.

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Translation and Religion: Interrogating Concepts, Methods and Practices

Conference Programme

The response to our call for papers was marvellously enthusiastic. With nearly fifty abstracts, balancing quantity with quality was a difficult task. We had at least 20-25 good abstracts and if time permitted, we would have been delighted to include more than the current 15 papers that we selected. Our aim was to ensure a good range of religions, regions and languages to enable discussion across various translation and religious traditions.

Apart from these, our two keynote speakers, Alan Williams and Arvind Pal Mandair, have sent us stimulating abstracts that focus on the conceptual and methodological challenges that accompany the study of religions in translation.

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Translation and Religion: Interrogating Concepts, Methods and Practices

University of Edinburgh, 1-3 September 2016

What is the relationship between ‘translation’ and ‘religion’? While all ‘religions’ travel and engage in translation of one kind or another, what gets translated? How do the different components of what is currently understood as ‘religion’—texts, practices, experiences, inner faith or belief systems—translate differently? How can we analyze such commonly held beliefs that some languages simply are sacred and should not be translated? And what are the implications of such questions for understanding religious conversion? What can translation concepts and methods tell us about the way religions and the study of religions are constructed?

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Narratives of Transformation: Language, Conversion, and Indian Traditions of ‘Autobiography’

Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, December 14-15, 2015

The project team organised an intensive workshop examining traditions of life writing in Indian languages in December 2015. The workshop’s theme on the articulation and representation of ‘self-transformation’ across a range of texts and language traditions gave us the opportunity to embed the project’s focus on conversion accounts in a wider comparative context. There was an enthusiastic response to our Call for Papers from scholars in India working on specific autobiographical texts exploring various kinds of transformation, including the perceived self-transformation engendered by religious conversion.

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European Conference on South Asian Studies, July 2016

The project team proposed a panel for the 24th ECSAS (European Conference on South Asian Studies) which will take place at the University of Warsaw (Poland) from 27 to 30 July 2016. The panel has been accepted and the call for papers is now open. If your research intersects with the panel theme below, please visit the conference website and submit your paper proposal at http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easas/ecsas2016/.

Download conference details (PDF)

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