In the discussion of the history of Christianity, the issue of translation is inevitably present, and yet the discipline of Translation Studies too often neglects the potential for insight that this rich history of translation can bring. This article seeks to reconcile these academic fields, allowing each to enlighten the other. In particular, by presenting the example of the nineteenth-century French Protestant missionary François Coillard (1834–1904) and his translation methods, the article posits colonial missionary narratives as useful not only for considering historical translation processes but also for reconsidering some of the assumptions of contemporary translation theory. By employing sources written by Coillard as well as those written about this ‘Livingstone français’, it challenges the assumptions prevalent in translation theory that the translator is invisible and that he works alone.

When Christian values fall into the hands of translators, how are these Christian values represented in a non-religious or areligious target culture? How do the translations reflect the conflicting ideologies of the time and of the individual translators? This article will examine Lin Shu's major translations of The Merchant of Venice in early twentieth-century China, an important period when reform of Confucianism encountered imported Western ideals. Close textual analysis of the translation produced by Lin Shu, a Confucian literatus and a reformist, reveals that religious content in English literary works was manipulated, Christian references often being omitted or adapted. This study illustrates the translator's strategies, picking and choosing what to domesticate in the translated work to suit his ideology, and how a society's expectations and ideologies shape the translation product. The analysis offers some perspectives for understanding how the translator's linguistic and religious roles and ideologies shaped the Chinese Shakespeare, and how the religious values were re-presented in early twentieth-century China.

Dorothy L. Sayers's twelve-part wartime radio life of Christ The Man Born to be King has been judged ‘an astonishing and far-reaching innovation’, not only because it used colloquial speech and because Jesus was a character voiced by an actor, but also because it brought the gospels into people's lives in a way that demanded an imaginative response. In spite of this, Sayers insisted that her purpose was not evangelization. Sayers's writing on theological aesthetics asserts that a work of art will only speak to its audience if the artist ‘serves the work’ rather than trying to preach. This article locates her thinking in the context of William Temple's sacramentalism and Jacques Maritain's neo-Thomism, suggesting that Temple's biblical exegesis was central to her approach in dramatizing the gospels. Finally an argument is made for Sayers's influence on mid-century thinking about the arts through her association with Bishop George Bell.

In the mid-1930s Joy Ridderhof, a Quaker missionary, returned from her missionary work in Honduras a physically broken woman. In the process of recovering from malaria and the other illnesses that had not allowed her to remain on the mission field she began a new project that would transform how the gospel message was disseminated around the world. Ridderhof imagined the possibilities associated with proclaiming the message of Jesus through the use of phonograph records for Spanish listeners. The benefit of making sound recordings was quickly recognized by missionaries who were trying to reach largely illiterate and, in some cases, pre-literate populations. Ridderhof was soon asked to expand from her initial foray into Spanish language records to make recordings in other North American indigenous languages and, eventually, languages from around the world. This article analyses how Ridderhof managed this endeavour while embracing new media technologies to bring the sound of the gospel to the people of the world in their native tongue.

Archbishop Donald Robinson (b. 1922) had a distinguished career as a New Testament scholar and senior churchman. As a New Testament scholar, he emphasized the linguistic and cultural distance between what Barth called ‘the strange new world of the Bible’ and our own. However, as a senior churchman, Robinson was required to traverse the distance between the Bible and twentieth-century Australians. Through his episcopal leadership, and notably through his work in producing An Australian Prayer Book (1978), Robinson faced the challenge of speaking to Australians about God, and finding the words by which Australians might speak to God. This article will explore the ways in which a prominent scholar and churchman grappled with the linguistic and cultural challenges of speaking about God and to God in contemporary Australia, understood against the background of the crisis of (ir)relevance faced by Australian churches in the decline of the 1960s and 1970s.

Focusing on the ‘translatability’ of Christianity in Africa is now commonplace. This approach stresses that African Christian practice is thoroughly inculturated and relevant to local cultural concerns. However, in exclusively emphasizing Christianity's indigeneity, an opportunity is lost to understand how Africans entered into complex relationships with North Americans to shape a common field of religious practice. To better illuminate the transnational, open-faced nature of Christianity in Africa, this article discusses the history of a twentieth-century Christian faith healing movement called Zionism, a large black Protestant group in South Africa. Eschewing usual portrayals of Zionism as an indigenous Southern African movement, the article situates its origins in nineteenth-century industrializing, immigrant Chicago, and describes how Zionism was subsequently reimagined in a South African context of territorial dispossession and racial segregation. It moves away from isolated regional histories of Christianity to focus on how African Protestantism emerged as the product of lively transatlantic exchanges in the late modern period.