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The idea of keywords was introduced in Raymond Williams' seminal Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), and has since had a profound influence on research in multiple fields. This article explores what the idea of keywords might contribute to the study of interlinear translations from Arabic into Javanese. The interlinear translation, which presents an Arabic text with a word-for-word Javanese translation appearing between its lines, is a space where languages, beliefs, and entire histories encounter one another on the page. Taking as my example the 1864 interlinear Babad Maulud (a Javanese translation of the Arabic Maulid Syaraf al-Anām , recited on the Prophet Muhammad's birthday), I suggest that despite the Javanese translator's overall literal translation strategy which attempted to duplicate the original, he or she decided to add "Javanese keywords" at particular points in the translation, with such exceptions revealing contemporary Javanese understandings of social etiquette, identity and genealogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores five Maulid Syaraf al-Anām ('The birth of the best of mankind') manuscripts produced in the Indonesian-Malay world. The five manuscripts all include the Arabic text of this well known and highly popular panegyric recited on the anniversary of the Prophet's birthday as well as on other auspicious occasions, with the Arabic translation into either Malay or Javanese written between the lines. Each manuscript was inscribed at a different site between the late 18th and late 19th centuries: one is from Aceh, another from the so-called 'Malay' diaspora in colonial Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), a third from Patani, in today's southern Thailand, while a fourth was copied in Mecca. These four include interlinear translations of the Arabic into Malay. The fifth manuscript, from Java, has a Javanese translation. Through a close reading of one narrative section of the Arabic Maulid and its translations, and their comparison with a vernacular telling, the article engages in a preliminary manner with questions of standardisation, creativity and cultural particularity within the wide, yet little-studied realm of interlinear translations from the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]