Theology and Politics of Conversion: An Analysis of Translations of the New Testament into Indigenous Languages in Guatemala and Mexico

Translations of the New Testament (NT) into indigenous languages have been fundamental in the strategy of contemporary US Protestant mission aiming to convert native people of Latin America from their religion and Catholicism. The phenomenon of the dissem ination of Evangelical Protestantism through translated Bibles has, however, not been satisfactorily covered in the research on mission and conversion of indigenous people in Latin America. The research project wants to investigate how US Protestantism is adopted to an indigenous linguistic and religious system. The primary targets of the investigations are the NT translated into the Mayan language Ch'orti' of eastern Guatemala and the one translated into the Nahuatl dialect of northern Puebla, Mexico by the North American Christian-Evangelical organisation Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) or Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT). The translated nouns "sin"/"sinner", "salvation"/"saviour" and verbs "to sin"; "to save" will be investigated within the conte xt of chosen passages of the translated NT in order to see how they correspond to Protestant theology, as understood by SIL/WBT, and the indigenous linguistic and religious system. The missionary activities not only challenge the Hispanic ideological hege mony of the Catholic Church, but also the cultural heritage of local native traditions, religions and identities. The relations between SIL/WTB and the Catholic Church and (New-) Pentecostal Charismatic missionary institutions will be taken in to account. An investigation of the practice of the missionary linguistics in relation to the process of translation and linguistic field work leads to a consideration of the phenomenon of political Evangelical-Protestant Christianity and mission in a modern, post-c olonial context, where contact among religions, conflict among religions, trans-culturation, acculturation and syncretism will be among the analytical concepts that are central to the understanding of the process.