Maria Khachaturyan 10/19/2015 Invited lecture at Linguistic anthropology working group, UC Berkeley, anthropology department “Did the fire of baptism burn you?” Translation and understanding in Mano Catholic service What does it mean to understand religious doctrine? More precisely: what do newly-converted African Catholics understand when they assist mass and catechism? I first got interested in this question when I was reading with my Mano language consultant the Gospel of Matthew in Mano as yet another source of linguistic data for my project of Mano grammar. I was struck by the rendering of the Holy Spirit – Gɛ̀ɛ̀ Pl, which literally means a white spirit of a dead person. As I found later, I was not the only one to be surprised. Father Lelong, a chronicler of the early years of Catholic missionaries in Guinea and Liberia, cites Father Massol, a young missionary who worked with Guinean Manos in 1940s, who said: “- The missionaries of Liberian Mano [...] had translated Holy Spirit by a word which means ‘a spirit of the forest’. One should say kili msia” (Lelong 1949: 188). Further, as we were reading about the Magi in (Matthew 2.11), we came across a strange selection of gifts: g w pɔ̄ɔ̀ g̰̰ yzɛ̀ lɛ́ s fɛ́ lɛ́ŋ́k̰sɛ̀ w mɛ́ɛ̀ ... lit.: gold, and things that smell good that are called frankincense, and a fetish in the form of the cane... My consultant hesitated for a while and then explained: “You know, Josef is often depicted with a cane, it must be this cane that Magi brought to him”. I still don’t know how this cane managed to replace myrrh, and I have no-one to ask: the protestant missionaries who published in 1978 the New Testament in Mano, a work of impressive quality overall, perished in the Civil war in Liberia. Errors, as in my second example, or (apparently) devastating polysemy, as in the first example, are not proper only to Mano translation. For example, as William Hanks points it (2010, 2013), the errors in Maya translations of catechism and prayers made by the first Spanish missionaries were not corrected before mid-eighteenth century, two hundred years after the conquest. Mano simply didn’t have this time, although at least in Guinea Gɛ̀ɛ̀ Pl was finally replaced by Kl i