Mapping and Translating Spaces Cultures and Languages

“All major cultural exchanges in history involved translation” (Burke Hsia 2007). Among these, the translations that occurred in the hemisphere that the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529) placed under the influence of the Portuguese Empire and Royal Patronage are not yet adequately valorised. They involved Amerindian, African and Asian cultures and languages, and were mostly based on Portuguese, Latin and also Italian as translational languages.

The project “Mapping and Translating Spaces, Cultures and Languages” (MAT) combines the methods of history with those of linguistics and translation studies to promote an innovative interdisciplinary analysis of the processes of cultural (mis)communication and (mis)translation among communities across the Portuguese Empire and Royal Patronage between 1540 and 1700.

The project has three main objectives:

1) Drawing up a comprehensive analytical catalogue of overlooked, dispersed metalinguistic and multilingual sources - reports, letters, Christian doctrines, maps, word lists, lexicons, grammars, which describe linguistic practices and\or display bilingual or three-lingual evidence - produced mostly in missionary contexts and in large part held in Italian and Portuguese religious and state archives.

2) Studying the emergence of multilingual communities in early modernity involving cultures and languages that were previously unknown in Europe.

3) Within this broad “horizontal” survey, highlighting two case studies to carry out an in-depth “vertical” comparative analysis of cultural-linguistic contacts and translations in Sub-Saharan Africa and China, specifically chosen because they are two paradigmatic, coeval but antithetical cases detailing the different shades of cultural translations in colonialism and missions.

The integration of two working strategies - the extensive mapping of intercultural multilingual sources and the analysis of two antithetical case studies - will allow us to undertake a comparative analysis of the processes related to the learning, imposing or rejection of cultures and languages in the “troubled pasts” of missionary and colonial contexts.

MAT connects historians, linguists and specialists of Chinese, Sub-Saharan African languages and Data Management, to document the largest possible corpora of translations in early modernity and offers new ideas on the relevance of linguistic interactions and on our multicultural and multilingual “troubled present”.

Major outputs include:

• scholarly publications in the form of journal articles, essays and two monographs; 

• two international workshops, a first in July 2024 and a second in the summer of 2025 

• a website containing a digital interactive open-access ATLAS and TIMELINE of documented and spatialised cultural and linguistic contacts between 1540 to 1700;

• a permanent exhibition;

• “Third mission” encounters with secondary schools;

• a teachers’ training project.