Missionary Position: The Irony of Translational Activism in Colonial Orissa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Translating was crucial to the missionary project everywhere, especially after the Protestant Reformation. In their competition to expand their reach, various denominations of missionaries not only translated the Scriptures into the various local languages where they went, but also mediated various modern institutions like the school system, health-care and print-technology in those traditional societies. These institutions and the activity of translation were often the means to achieve the ultimate goal of proselytization. Their rate of success in achieving their goal in different places varied for several reasons. In places like Orissa where there was a deep-rooted cultural and religious tradition, their rate of success was very low. Even the forces of modernity they tried to mediate were regarded with suspicion for a long time on account of the peculiar political condition prevalent in Orissa at that time. Their activism in Orissa during the early part of 19thcentury was conflated with colonial hegemony. Moreover, the racial and cultural pride of missionaries prevented them from respecting the local condition and culture. Therefore, the translations they undertook were perceived as ridiculous and were summarily rejected. Orissa already had a long literary-cultural and translatory practice. The missionary challenge, however, helped in reorienting and galvanizing this tradition in a specific way. Although the missionaries largely failed in achieving their primary goal, their activism ironically helped in the growth of a new synthetic translational and literary culture in Orissa, long after their influence had waned. Keywords:sub colonialism, cultural coding, translational activism,bhāsālanguage, oral culture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".