PIETRA

PIETRA

Pietra is the Italian word for 'rock', the foundation on which the Catholic Church was built. "Tu sei Pietro e su questa pietra edificherò la mia Chiesa | You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church." [Matthew 16,18]

First, large-scale, multilingual study

First, large-scale, multilingual study

PIETRA is funded by the European Research Council under its Consolidator Grant Scheme, Grant No. 101001478. It is a study of the foundations on which the Catholic Church builds its multilingual communicative structures, and is the first, large-scale, multilingual study of the translation products and processes that underpin communication in global religion.

The project focuses on translation practices in the institution of the Catholic Church and the multilingual communication of religious messages against a background of technological change. It poses key research questions relating to consistency of message in a large multilingual institution across different languages, cultures and communicative formats. PIETRA analyses the translation processes and products of the Catholic Church across three different media (print, web and social media) and in two different time periods to advance understandings of how multilingual dissemination intersects with technological change and institutional ideology.

PIETRA combines the latest advances in empirical translation research, data capture and analytics, with sociological and ethnographic investigations to form a model for the analysis of the products and processes of large-scale multilingual dissemination.

Principal Investigator

Professor Anne O’Connor of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures is the Principal Investigator of Pietra. She is Personal Professor and co-director of the Emily Anderson Centre for Translation Research and Practice in the University of Galway, Ireland.

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Pietra Focus

Pietra Focus

  • A model for future analysis of communicative strategies of multilingual institutions
  • Innovative and challenging insights into global communications circuits
  • Analysis of the Catholic Church as a multilingual institution
  • Analysis of the medium of communication and its influence on translation processes
  • Analysis of multimodal forms of religious translation
  • New knowledge of institutional translation
  • Re-evaluation of religious translation
Key Pietra Questions

Key Pietra Questions

  • How is authority expressed, maintained and inscribed in the translation process?
  • What sort of communicative and translational apparatus is used by the Catholic Church to circulate its ideology in a multilingual environment?
  • In large-scale translation endeavours, how is the coherency of the central message maintained across languages, cultures and forms?
  • How does the Catholic Church adapt its multilingual communication to changing media?
  • How does a religious institution deal with the democratisation of access to texts while at the same time continuing to propagate a centralised orthodox message?
  • New knowledge of institutional translation
  • How do the elements of readability and accessibility intersect with the demands of institutional translation?

The Team

The research team comprises of the PI, 2 postdoctoral researchers, 2 research assistants and 4 doctoral students. They are based in the University of Galway’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. For opportunities to join the team, please see https://mooreinstitute.ie/read/news/

PROJECT TEAM