Cover not available
Part of
Towards an Atlas of the History of Interpreting: Voices from around the world
Edited by Lucía Ruiz Rosendo and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón
[Benjamins Translation Library 159] 2023
► pp. 193–211

Chapter 8
Interpreters of mission

How indigenous peoples shaped mission projects across Australia and the Pacific

 | Australian National University
Focusing on the histories of interpretation in mission contexts across Australia and the Pacific, this chapter reveals that wherever they operated, missionaries depended on the cooperation of local intermediaries. Interpreters were vital. While this has long been noted in Pacific histories, scholars are only recently discovering similarities in Australia. Recent scholarship is also considering what Indigenous people themselves sought to achieve for their communities through interpreting, beyond resistance to or management of colonisers on their lands. The chapter concludes with three examples of Aboriginal interpreters who shaped the establishment of missions on their Country in various parts of North Australia in the twentieth century. It finds that interpreters upheld their cultural obligations to Country through their linguistic work.
Keywords: Australia, Pacific, missions, colonisation, interpreting, Christianity
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Interpreting and translating in the Pacific and Australian mission historiography
  • Country and interpreting at three North Australian missions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.159.08rad
References (49)
References
Archer, Christon I. 1986. “Spain and the Defence of the Pacific Ocean Empire, 1750–1810.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 11 (21): 15–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin-Broos, Diane. 2010. “Translating Christianity: Some Keywords, Events and Sites in Western Arrernte Conversion.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 21 (1): 14–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baigorri-Jalón, Jesús. 2015a. “The History of the Interpreting Profession.” In The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting, ed. by Holly Mikkelson, and Renée Jourdenais, 11–28. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2015b. “Un intérprete en la geopolítica del imperio español en el Pacífico sur a finales del siglo XVIII: Máximo Rodríguez en Tahití.” In Traducción y representaciones del conflicto desde España y América. Una perspectiva interdisciplinar, ed. by Icíar Alonso Araguás, Alba Páez Rodríguez, and Mario Samaniego Sastre, 107–126. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony. 2002. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Cambridge Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. New York: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body. Auckland: Auckland University Press.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla. eds. 2020. Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Brambilla, Emanuele. 2016. “Cowboys, Indians and Interpreters. On the controversial role of interpreters in the conquest of the American West.” The Interpreters’ Newsletter 21: 63–78.Google Scholar
Burarrwana, Laklak. 2019. Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines. Gay’wu Group of Women. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Campbell, Genevieve. 2013. “Ngarukuruwala – We Sing: The Songs of the Tiwi Islands, Northern Australia.” PhD diss., University of Sydney.
Chatwin, Bruce. 1988. The Songlines. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elbourne, Elizabeth. 2002. Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
. 2003. “Word Made Flesh: Christianity, Modernity, and Cultural Colonialism in the Work of Jean and John Comaroff.” The American Historical Review 108 (2): 435–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellerman, Evelyn. 2020. “‘Read It, Don’t Smoke It!”: Developing and Maintaining Literacy in Papua New Guinea.” In Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire, ed. by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Patterson, and Angela Wanhalla, 216–242. Durham, Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Elsmore, Bronwyn. 2000. Like Them That Dream: The Maori and the Old Testament, 2nd ed. Auckland: Reed Books.Google Scholar
Errington, Joseph. 2007. Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Carleton, Victoria: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Dying Words Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gardner, Helen Bethea. 2006a. Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania. Dunedin: Otago University Press.Google Scholar
. 2006b. ‘“New Heaven and New Earth”. Translation and Conversion on Aneityum.” The Journal of Pacific History 41 (3): 293–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gilmour, Rachael. 2006. Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodale, Jane. 1954. Melville Island Expedition 1954 Field Notebook, MS 4676 Series 1, Item 2. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.Google Scholar
Gunson, Niel. 1978. Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797–1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hart, Charles William Merton. 1954. “The sons of Turimpi.” American Anthropologist 56 (2): 242–261. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2003. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Huie-Jolly, Mary. 2008. “Maori “Jews” and a Resistant Reading of John 5.10–47.” In The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. by Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah, 10–47. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Keary, Anne. 2009. “Christianity, Colonialism, and Cross-Cultural Translation: Lancelot Threlkeld, Biraban, and the Awabakal.” Aboriginal History 33: 117–155.Google Scholar
Landau, Paul Stuart. 1995. The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom. Portsmouth: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Lange, Raeburn. 2000. “Indigenous Agents of Religious Change in New Zealand, 1830–1860.” Journal of Religious History 24 (3): 279–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matsuda, Matt K. 2012. Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
May, Sally K., Laura Rademaker, Donna Nadjamerrek, and Julie Narndal Gumurdul. 2020. The Bible in Buffalo Country: Oenpelli Mission 1925–1931. Canberra: ANU Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
May, Sally K., Laura Rademaker, Joakim Goldhahn, Paul SC Taçon, and Julie Narndal Gumurdul. 2021. “Narlim’s Fingerprints: Aboriginal Histories and Rock Art.” Journal of Australian Studies 45 (3): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Payàs, Gertrudis, José M. Zavala, and Mario Samaniego. 2012. “Translation and Interpretation on the Araucanian Frontier (seventeenth–nineteenth c.): An Interdisciplinary View.” Perspectives 20 (4): 433–450. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rademaker, Laura. 2018. Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
. 2020. “Challenging Indigenous Marriage from Within: Memories of the Tiwi’s Martina and the Figure of Malinche.” In Engendering Transnational Transgressions: From the Intimate to the Global, ed. by Eileen Boris, Sandra Trugden Dawson, and Barbara Molony, 98–114. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rafael, Vicente L. 1988. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Samson, Jane. 2010. “Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders, and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific.” In Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange, ed. by Patricia Grimshaw, and Andrew May, 704–721. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sanneh, Lamin. 1989. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.Google Scholar
Silva, Noenoe K. 2004. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Silva, Noenoe K., and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. 2017. The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Sleeper-Smith, Susan. 2001. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherts: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Stevens, Michael J. 2010. “Kāi Tahu Writing and Cross-Cultural Communication.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28: 130–157.Google Scholar
Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Turner, David. 1974. Tradition and Transformation: A Study of Aborigines in the Groote Eylandt Area, Northern Australia. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
Van Toorn, Penny. 2006. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.Google Scholar
Wetherell, David. 1977. Reluctant Mission: The Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea, 1891–1942. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar