Religious Translation, the Catholic Church and Global Media: a study of the products and processes of multilingual dissemination.

Project Information

PIETRA

Grant agreement ID: 101001478

DOI

10.3030/101001478

EC signature date 16 February 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 892 541,00

EU contribution

€ 1 892 541,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PIETRA (Religious Translation, the Catholic Church and Global Media: a study of the products and processes of multilingual dissemination.)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

PIETRA provides the first, large-scale, multilingual study of the translation products and processes that underpin communication in global religion. The project analyses the translation strategies, processes and products of the Catholic Church across three different media and in two different time periods to advance understandings of how multilingual dissemination intersects with technological change and institutional ideology. The central research question of PIETRA is whether and how consistency of message can be maintained in a large multilingual institution across different languages, cultures and communicative formats.

The development of a ground-breaking form of analysis of communicative strategies of multilingual institutions is crucial because, with so much translation now produced in an institutional setting, it is vital we are able to assess this work and understand its processes. The advent of new technologies necessitates a radical adjustment in how we conduct research in the domain and PIETRA is to the forefront in driving this innovation.

PIETRA Objectives
• Analysis of institutional translation practices and products embedded in the practical example of the Catholic Church.
• Innovative and transformative multilingual study of religious translation on a large scale across diverse media.
• Provision of a model for the analysis of multilingual output of a global institution in a multimedia world.
• Comparative analysis of multilingual practices in different historical eras and in different formats.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

PIETRA has combined the latest advances in empirical translation research, data capture and data analytics, with sociological and ethnographic investigations to examine the multilingual products and processes of the Catholic Church. The three work packages on the Pope’s Twitter account, the Vatican’s news website and the print networks of Catholicism are providing a unique insight into translation products and processes in religious and institutional settings.

In Work Package 1 – (Social Media: THE POPE ON TWITTER) a multilingual corpus of 10 years of tweets has been collected and aligned in 7 languages (Italian, French, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Polish and Arabic). The analysis of this corpus has begun and has focused on topic modelling, distributional variation, persuasiveness detection, readability and formality, inclusive language, metaphors and environmental discourse. Interviews have been conducted with Vatican communication teams.
In Work Package 2 – (Website: VATICAN NEWS) a multilingual corpus from the website Vatican News (https://www.vaticannews.va/) has been created which is multimodal in nature. Structured interviews have been conducted with members of the Vatican News linguistic teams and management. The constructive news content in reporting on environmental issues has been studied and a chapter on this submitted for publication.
Work Package 3 – (Print: RELIGIOUS TRANSLATION IN PRINT MEDIA) a corpus of translated religious books in the nineteenth century is currently under construction. Within this, a subcorpus of the translated works of St. Alfonso Liguori has been compiled and analysed in English and in French. This work is being combined within an analytical framework of infrastructures of global Catholicism, a new approach being proposed by the PI which will be included in an edited collection on Global Catholicism.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The innovative methodological design offers a new approach to the study of religious translation, on a scale that has not been attempted before. It furthermore addresses a fundamental gap in the literature by assessing the linguistic aspect of online religion. Finally, it expands the study of religious translation from core canonical texts to wider media platforms and multimodal forms of communication, with a focus on the material carrier of the religious message. The project is innovatively placing language at the heart of discussions of religious communication; it is questioning the presence of religious translation in a globalised communication circuit and it is analyses the impact of the material carrier on the communication strategies. Uniquely it is doing this across multiple languages, and the methodological approach and results to date show transformative outcomes for the field.