ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how various religious encounters, which take place in and through language, can be meaningfully examined in connection to and in terms of translation. At an interpersonal and collective level, a religious encounter may also lead to a conversion which in itself becomes a complex and multi-faceted act as social, political, economic and other pressures come into play. Translation is presupposed by religious encounter because religion is inevitably bound to language. The Reformation as a new religious movement derived much of its momentum from the reformers' translational activity, popularised on an unprecedented scale due to the recently invented printing press. Translation encounters of religions, as in any other social sphere, involve competing interests: between different ideological positions, between the dominant and the less powerful, and between those who translate and those who use a translation. Audiovisual translation increasingly embraces the study of 'content' and the form of content to be supplied to technologists.
