Translation, Religion and Social Media

This book offers the first large-scale study of multilingual religious discourse on social media, exploring the role of translation in shaping global digital communication through a structured analysis of the multilingual Twitter account of Pope Francis.

The volume brings Translation Studies scholarship on social media into dialogue with two decades of research in Religious Studies on digital religion, highlighting the central role of multilingualism and translation in the circulation of religious discourse across digital platforms. O’Connor and Tanasescu critically reflect on how, in his tweets, the head of the Catholic Church offered a new form of papal communication that was at once pastoral, dialogic, and globally engaged. The authors draw on diverse frameworks and methodologies, including quantitative approaches, computational methods, discourse analysis, and ethnography to contextualize the Pope’s Twitter output expressed in nine different languages. By examining how religious messages are translated, adapted and circulated across languages on social media, the book advances our understanding of the relationship between translation, digital communication and the global reach of religious discourse.

Providing new perspectives on the intersection of language, technology, and religion in shaping global communication today, this book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, religious studies, digital multilingual communication, media studies and digital humanities.