Quando os missionários das religiões japonesas começaram a traduzir os textos religiosos para o português com a finalidade de propagar os seus ensinamentos entre os brasileiros, tradicionalmente católicos, perceberam que algumas de suas mensagens eram interpretadas de modo equivocado. Entretanto, os missionários perceberam que o equívoco não era causado por problemas lingüísticos, mas por diferenças entre a cultura do seu público-alvo e a sua. No presente trabalho, investigamos os problemas culturais encontrados na tradução dos textos religiosos japoneses, bem como as soluções encontradas pelos seus tradutores, analisando trechos dos seus textos sagrados.

When missionaries from Japanese religions first translated their religious text into Portuguese in order to propagate their faith among Brazilian people, who are traditionally Catholic, they realized that some of their religious messages were completely misunderstood by their prospective followers. However, the missionaries noticed that this problem was not caused by language matters but it lay in the existence of a cultural difference between Brazilian people and them. In the present work the cultural problems that stood in the translation of Japanese religious texts as well as the solutions found by their translators were studied by analyzing parts of the scriptures of three different Japanese religions.