The aim of this special issue is to engage in a comparative study of translation practices and methods across religious traditions, with particular attention to examining various types of control and censorship in different historical and cultural contexts. The issue intends to demonstrate the importance of studying the politics of censorship in translation processes for a nuanced understanding of how perceptions regarding appropriate language use affect religious conversion and processes of identity formation. However, censorship in the translation of religions is not to be viewed only negatively, as always having a detrimental effect on the target culture, and it is hoped that some papers will be able to explore productive types of control that may have been used for radical questioning of existing status quo (for instance, feminist translations of scriptures).

As the special issue proposes to explore how religion, translation and identity are embedded within intersecting cultural processes, contributors are encouraged to venture beyond the constitutive power of language and offer papers that also examine non-linguistic aspects of religious translation and censorship where relevant. Articles may discuss any of the following religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and New Religious Movements.

Contributors to the special issue might offer theoretical, empirical and/or historical studies on any of the issues raised above. Articles are invited on one or more of the following themes/questions but will not necessarily be limited to them:

1. Notions of translatability in the religious context.
2. Formal and informal forms of censorship that affect religious translations.
3. The status of the translator’s own interpretation as a potential form of censorship.
4. Ways in which metatexts of sacred texts regulate reader responses in order to ensure that ‘free’ interpretations remain within the bounds of the orthodox.
5. Conceptions of ‘original’ and authorship and the part they play in the interpretation and translation of religious texts.
6. The processes of patronage that control religious translation—is it possible to see religious translations as exercises of cultural power or as instruments of social control?
7. Types of cultural negotiations required for translating and representing a religion to a new culture.
8. Religious translations and censorship in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
9. The role(s) and function(s) of ‘re-translations’ of scriptures.
10. How is censorship of translation by hegemonic groups different from the censorship of non-elite sections of a religious community?
11. Censorship of rival religions.
12. The dialogue between religions and how they might influence each other through translation.