Abstract
Most people build their lives around some complex carbohydrate which often comes in the form of bread. Bread also became an important religious concept in Christianity, where it plays an integral part during the Holy Communion. And since the Moravian Church, the prominent translators of the Scripture in Tibet, perceive the "breaking of bread" as a "social responsibility", they had to challenge the local food cultures to provide an accurate translation.
The first translation of the New Testament into Tibetan was prepared in Ladakh by a Moravian missionary Heinrich August Jäschke (1817-1883) and published in 1885. He is well known for his perfectionism and ability to find suitable equivalents even for words notoriously hard to translate like the Holy Spirit or angel. He even collected depictions of Tibetan punishments to translate the concept of crucifixion properly.
In our paper, we will focus on the early attempts in translating the "unleavened bread," a concept abounding with symbolical meaning. We will look at the Gospels crucial for the Holy Communion (Mt 26:26, Mk 14:22, Lk 22:19) to examine how the translators challenged the problems of cross-cultural transmission. What were the sources of Jäschke's translation? What equivalents of bread were available in the Tibetan cultural sphere at that time? What Tibetan word was employed for bread by him and why? Did it change in the later editions? Is this problem even reflected in his Tibetan-English dictionary? And how was Jäschke dealing with the local food culture in general?