ABSTRACT
Translation is central to the study of religion, in so far as all scholars have recourse to translating and translations, and it is also a subject that discloses major methodological problems in our fi eld. The reason for this is most simply put thus: translating requires the closest of readings, and all of religion requires ‘translating’. Until recently, translation was something done without much methodological thinking applied to it-as one senior colleague once summed-up the prevailing attitude: ‘it’s a matter of fl ying by the seat of your pants: you know a good translation when you see one’. The relatively new discipline of translation studies has made scholars of religion sit up and think about what they are doing. 1 In our business of handling and translating sacred texts from all over the world, we are in a uniquely privileged position to refl ect on how the challenges of translation raise more general methodological issues in the study of religion. I have written elsewhere (Williams 2004) and at length on this subject and therefore shall not repeat substantially
the arguments and examples of that piece (see Box 2.21.1 for a summary of questions raised in that essay).
