Shaping minds and cultures. The impact of missionary translations in Southern India

Abstract

This study focuses in Confession manuals (16th-17th cent.), including two bilingual dictionaries (TA-PT and PT-TA) and a glossary of religious terms. The main objective of the linguistic analysis is to understand the extent of the missionaries' knowledge on Indian traditions and the way they used this knowledge while translating the terminology of the Christian religion into Tamil. The study focuses on the translation devices adopted by different authors in terms of lexical variation according to contexts and audience.