Caroline Mangerel

The book under review comprises ten articles, originating from the 7 th Conference on Missionary Linguistics held at the University of Bremen. In the introduction, the editors sketch the field of interest by first arguing that, in the context of missionary linguistics, their interest lies with the " cognitive appropriation of the indigenous languages and cultures and the practical aim to colonize or, at least, influence the culture of the (indigenous) 'other' " (viii). The interest of the volume is further described as " interlinguistic perception, i.e. the perception of one language through the vision of another " (viii). In this perspective, the documentation, study, codification and linguistic structuring that took place when missionaries worked in foreign contexts entail translation. This claim with wide-ranging implications is, unfortunately, not theorised further in the introduction or in the individual chapters. The editors also point out that they are not only interested in Bible translation but in the wider linguistic work of missionaries, e.g. bilingual ethnographies, catechisms and lexicons. The collection of essays is divided into two groups, namely New Spain and Asia. In the first article in the volume, Zwartjes provides an overview of the contribution that the missionaries made to translation studies. He argues that " [t]he contribution of missionaries in the colonial period to translation studies has been generally neglected in handbooks on Western translation theory " (2) and laments the resultant perception that missionary linguists did not contribute much to Western translation theory. Importantly, he points out the fact that much of translation in the Spanish colonial period was exogenous, i.e. the missionaries translated foreign-language texts into Spanish. His article then presents a significant amount of empirical data on translation practices in the period under discussion and concludes with a summary of the implications of these data for translation theory. Ríos Castaño is responsible for the second paper, focussing his attention on an exogenous translation where a missionary, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, translated a collection of Nahuatl oral texts comprising different genres into Spanish. The paper points out with extensive empirical data how the translation was domesticated, turning the foreign into both Christian and Spanish. The author concludes that this translation is " a crucible of interests and objectives " (79). Some of these include the codification of the foreign language, the 1 Marais reviewed the chapters written in English, and Mangerel reviewed the chapters written in Spanish.