section_path: Translations
section_name: Translations
paragraph_text: Translations
  
  The first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita was published by Charles Wilkins in 1785. The Wilkins translation had an introduction to the Gita by Warren Hastings. Soon the work was translated into other European languages such as French (1787), German, and Russian. In 1849, the Weleyan Mission Press, Bangalore published The Bhagavat-Geeta, Or, Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures, with Sanskrit, Canarese and English in parallel columns, edited by Rev. John Garrett, with the effort being supported by Sir Mark Cubbon.
  
  In 1981, Larson stated that "a complete listing of Gita translations and a related secondary bibliography would be nearly endless". According to Larson, there is "a massive translational tradition in English, pioneered by the British, solidly grounded philologically by the French and Germans, provided with its indigenous roots by a rich heritage of modern Indian comment and reflection, extended into various disciplinary areas by Americans, and having generated in our time a broadly based cross-cultural awareness of the importance of the Bhagavad Gita both as an expression of a specifically Indian spirituality and as one of the great religious "classics" of all time."
  
  According to Sargeant, the Gita is "said to have been translated at least 200 times, in both poetic and prose forms". Richard Davis cites a count by Callewaert & Hemraj in 1982 of 1,891 translations of the Bhagavad Gita in 75 languages, including 273 in English. These translations vary, and are in part an interpretative reconstruction of the original Sanskrit text that differ in their "friendliness to the reader", and in the amount of "violence to the original Gita text".
  
  The translations and interpretations of the Gita have been so diverse that these have been used to support apparently contradictory political and philosophical values. For example, Galvin Flood and Charles Martin note that interpretations of the Gita have been used to support "pacifism to aggressive nationalism" in politics, from "monism to theism" in philosophy. According to William Johnson, the synthesis of ideas in the Gita is such that it can bear almost any shade of interpretation. A translation "can never fully reproduce an original and no translation is transparent", states Richard Davis, but in the case of the Gita the linguistic and cultural distance for many translators is large and steep which adds to the challenge and affects the translation. For some native translators, their personal beliefs, motivations, and subjectivity affect their understanding, their choice of words and interpretation. Some translations by Indians, with or without Western co-translators, have "orientalist", "apologetic", "Neo-Vedantic" or "guru phenomenon" biases.
  
  According to the exegesis scholar Robert Minor, the Gita is "probably the most translated of any Asian text", but many modern versions heavily reflect the views of the organization or person who does the translating and distribution. In Minor's view, the Harvard scholar Franklin Edgerton's English translation and Richard Garbe's German translation are closer to the text than many others. According to Larson, the Edgerton translation is remarkably faithful, but it is "harsh, stilted, and syntactically awkward" with an "orientalist" bias and lacks "appreciation of the text's contemporary religious significance".