Adapting a global religion to local languages and customs does not loosen the bond to its distant homeland; it strengthens it. To become and live as believers, distant peoples had to stay attached to the far-off origins, so local reinvention and looking back to the source happen together.
Printing a story lets it reach larger and more varied audiences, but it also freezes one version on the page with a fixed author and date. That fixing quietly casts the other circulating versions as less correct or authoritative.
Religious translators were not measured by how faithfully they matched the original but by whether their version won converts or strengthened faith. Because success meant moving hearts, translators had licence to reshape stories freely.
A shared scriptural language creates a cosmopolitan zone where local languages keep their own identity but bend toward it, borrowing its words, grammar and literary devices to varying degrees. Over time the borrowed language stops feeling foreign to its new speakers.
A religion spreads into a new culture partly through the plain work of rendering its texts word by word into local languages, and each translation in turn makes new converts who want more translations. Literary networks of copied and retold texts may have carried a faith as far as merchants, travellers and mystic brotherhoods did.