Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission

About this episode

Tazin Abdullah interviews Dr. Laura Rademaker about her book exploring language interactions on a Christian mission in Northern Australia.

In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah talks to Dr. Laura Rademaker (Australian National University), the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission. The conversation explores the distinctive historical context of Australia’s Northern Territory as a location for Christian missionary activity. Tazin and Laura talk about the multiple tensions and elements involved in language interactions between monolingual English-speaking missionaries and multilingual Indigenous communities, against the background of settler colonialism. Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission was published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. About the book Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective “mistranslations.” In particular, this work traces the Angurugu…

People in this episode

Host: Tazin Abdullah

Guest: Dr. Laura Rademaker

Topics covered

• missionary activity
• language interactions
• Indigenous communities
• settler colonialism
• cross-cultural relations
• translation

Keywords

• translation
• Christian mission
• Indigenous languages
• colonization
• cultural relations
• Australia
• missionaries

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Australian National University, University of Hawai’i Press

Books & works: Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission

Places: Australia, Northern Territory, Groote Eylandt archipelago

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