Story, Sentence, Single Word: Translation Paradigms in Javanese and Malay Islamic Literature

Indonesia today is the world's second most linguistically diverse country and home to the world's largest population of Muslims. Taken together these two statistics have meant that within the gradual yet profound process of Islamization in Southeast Asia, and in what is currently the nation-state of Indonesia, translation was of pivotal importance. Through ongoing contact and exchange with people and texts from the Middle East and South Asia from the sixteenth century onwards, local literatures written and recited in Javanese and Malay (among other languages) were transformed, introducing to the speakers of these languages new genres, words, stories, and characters as well as a new way of understanding the past. This essay outlines three translation paradigms employed by those translating Arabic texts into Malay and Javanese and explores what they tell us – together and separately – about religious and linguistic change, the transmission of knowledge, and particular translation traditions.