The religious message brought by the Syriac Churches to Central Asia and China between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was adapted to different local contexts through a process of translation involving different languages - from Syriac to Sogdian, Uyghur, Chinese, Middle Persian -, different scripts, text materiality, as well as specific choices of terms and symbols. Translation here should be understood as cultural translation. Given the above, this paper aims to analyse how the concepts of testimony and martyrdom are interpreted and (re)transmitted in the Central Asian Christian context through case studies drawn from hagiographic and martyrological literature in the Sogdian language.