Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the multilingual communicative infrastructure of the Catholic Church to discuss how a global religion is enabled by translational scaffolding.

Paper long abstract:

The Catholic Church has an unprecedented commitment to communication in multiple languages across various formats. The history, scope and extent of this multilingualism is unparalleled: from multilingual Twitter to contemporary stories on Vatican News, the Catholic Church reaches out to millions of people on a daily basis in their own native language. This multilingual effort is largely hidden and unacknowledged even though it is a fundamental infrastructure for a global religion. This paper will discuss the translational structures in place to enable multilingual religious communication in the Catholic Church. Although much is known about the institutional multilingual infrastructure of international organisations such as the EU or the UN (Pym 2000; Tosi 2003; Trebits 2009; Biel 2014; Drugan, Strandvik et al. 2018), the multilingualism of the Catholic Church has been largely ignored and investigations of translation structures have been largely confined to the Bible.

Using findings from the research project PIETRA (ERC grant 101001478) this paper will analyse how translational scaffolding allows for global communicative capacities which transcend the institutional centre. The processes involved in supporting multilingual output reveal how a collective is enabled despite linguistic difference. The mediation between the religious centre and regional locations through translation is not without its difficulties, however, as cultural and linguistic difference challenge the desire for a united religious community. Consistency of message across multiple languages, cultures and formats can put demands on the communicative apparatus of a universalizing religion. The paper will show how the tension between the need of religious authorities to control their message and the desire to communicate it as widely as possible is particularly acute at moments of technological change in the communication apparatus, placing additional strains on the capacities of the infrastructural linguistic scaffolds.