Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses in the missionary as intercultural mediator and the cultural translation strategies used by the Jesuit missionaries. I analyze the Mezzabarba report to give a general approach on the cultural translation methods during the first half of the 18th century.

Paper long abstract:

The Chinese Rites controversy is currently a hot topic in many different fields related with the History of Religions, Translation or Intercultural Mediation. I am currently translating and analysing pieces of the diary and report titled Istoria delle cose operate nella Cina by the Vatican commissioner in China Carlo Ambrogio Mezzabarba and have focused my work not only in the controversy itself, but also, firstly, on the figure of the missionary as an intercultural mediator; secondly, on the cultural translation strategies used by the Jesuits and, finally, in the concept they had of the Confucianism, seen by the Jesuits as a philosophical behaviour guide more than as another religion, having then a different point of view than the Vatican. Terminological problems such as the adaptation of the concept of "God" or "Soul" and how they were solved by the missionaries leaded to subsequent problems caused by cultural and conceptual misunderstandings between both cultures and the understanding of christianity by the Chinese. The arguments of the great debate on this topic in the Vatican against the Jesuits produced the extinction of this religious missionary company in 1773. This paper goes deeply in the ethnographical approaches included in Mezzabarba report and his own considerations on this debate according to this own experiences in China to give a general approach on the cultural translation languages in the first half of the 18th century.