Bible Localization and the Politics of Memory and Oblivion

Abstract

For centuries the Bible and its teaching have been used to construct identities in the Western world. Today the range of ‘legitimate’ identities is much larger than several decades ago. Facing issues of ethnicity, religion, gender-role identity and sexual orientation, people are confronted with restated contemporary questions of ‘Who am I? and ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ These questions are often hard to answer and many people struggle with them throughout their whole lives.

What we are witnessing today is an extreme case of what the author calls ‘groupcentric Bible translation’ or ‘Bible localization’, also referred to as ‘niche Bibles’. Groupcentric translation is a logical continuation of ethnocentric translation that distorts the other culture to suit the views of a new audience. Another way to describe this phenomenon is to use the term ‘localization’ taken from the software industry that describes any changes required to adapt a product to the needs of a particular ‘locale’, i.e. a group of people united by their common language and cultural conventions.