Over the long nineteenth century, translations of Christian scripture into indigenous languages were produced at a far greater rate than at any time previously, a product of both the rise of the modern Protestant missionary movement and the acceleration of British imperial and Anglo settler colonial conquest. This article explores a dimension of the global evangelical translation project: the translation of the word “God.” Where, at the close of the sixteenth century, there were just under 30 different words used to translate “God” in published vernacular, between 1800 and the early twentieth century close to 400 new “Gods” entered the Christian lexicon. Reading translation conflicts for what they tell us about the way power was imagined on the modern Anglo-American colonial frontier, this article argues that contests over the translation of “God” offer a window into the cultural and intellectual dimension of colonial conflict, and reveal a neglected chapter in the conceptual history of sovereignty: at the very moment when the concept of sovereignty was increasingly imagined on the model of the law-bound territorial state, alternative theories of sovereign power entered global circulation.

中文翻译：

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在主权的边界上翻译上帝

在漫长的 19 世纪，将基督教经文翻译成土著语言的速度比以往任何时候都快得多，这是现代新教传教运动兴起以及大英帝国和盎格鲁殖民者殖民征服加速的产物。本文探讨了全球福音派翻译项目的一个维度：“上帝”一词的翻译。在 16 世纪末，只有不到 30 个不同的词用于在已出版的白话文中翻译“上帝”，而在 1800 年到 20 世纪初，将近 400 个新的“上帝”进入了基督教词典。阅读翻译冲突，了解他们告诉我们在现代英美殖民边境上想象权力的方式，