When Jesus speaks colloquial Egyptian Arabic: an incarnational understanding of translation

Al-Khabar al-Ṭayyib bitāʿ Yasūʿ al-Masīḥ (the Good News of Jesus Christ, 1927) is one of the earliest, if not the first, translation of the New Testament into colloquial Arabic. Initiated by the British missionary and civil engineer William Willcocks, the translation responds to different linguistic and ideological tensions at a time when Egypt endeavoured to configure its national identity. In using colloquial Egyptian Arabic, the translation was motivated by the then dominant missionary ethos of translating into the vernaculars, which was propagated at the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910. This article has two aims: first to understand Willcocks’ translation in light of two competing conceptualisations of ‘sacred language’ among speakers of Arabic in Egypt; second, to explore the synergy between theology and translation studies and test the viability of theological concepts such as that of ‘incarnation’ in explaining translation phenomena in the sacred context.