Interlinear translations have been available across the Indonesian-Malay world since at least the late 16th century yet they have never been the topic of a large scale study to date. The work of
TEXTUAL MICROCOSMS addresses interlinear translations from a range of perspectives, including linguistic, historical, religious, philological, literary, visual and pedagogical. Some of these perspectives are novel while others have been adopted in studies of only a limited scope in the past. The database being created as part of TEXTUAL MICROCOSMS will constitute a first-ever attempt to map the phenomenon of interlinear translation – across languages, scripts, sites, texts, compilers, schools of thought – in the Indonesian-Malay world.
In the second half of the project we expect further results and outputs, including an MA thesis on performative interlinear translation in Bali, a Ph.D. dissertation on the history of interlinear translations of the Qur’an in Java, and a series of articles that will engage with, among other topics,
a gendered perspective on interlinear translation in Indonesia, visual dimensions of interlinear manuscripts, the historiography of interlinear texts from the Indonesian-Malay world, dictionaries as interlinear texts. Further papers are planned based on our research and on the process of creating the database and the computer vision model.
We will hold workshops and international conferences. The next conference is scheduled for November 2024 and will focus on “Interlinear translation across the Muslim world,” allowing us to think broadly and comparatively about the phenomenon we study and engage in discussion with a wide range of experts. Invited scholars will speak about interlinear texts from Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, the Ottoman world and the Middle East.
We will also continue publishing our blog on a monthly basis, making available to students, scholars and anyone interested information and insights on particular interlinear texts and on theoretical and methodological issues related to their study.