I would like to propose a change in our “default” reference to the upcoming translation changes to the Roman Missal.
At the moment there are three camps: There is the “It’s About Time” camp (of which I am a card-carrying member) and there is the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Seeking to Undermine the Glorious Empowering Liturgical Reforms of the Last Forty Years” camp, of which I am not. I suspect that each of these camps represent about 10% of Catholics. In between, there are 80% who currently belong to the “What New Translation?” camp. In political circles, these are called “swing voters.”
We are currently referring to the upcoming translations as “new.” While accurate, this reference is also editorially neutral. As most people don’t know there is anything wrong with the current translations, their default position will likely be “why hassle me with a change where none is needed?” They might also conclude that the original prayers were simply re-written by Pope Benedict to reflect his conservative agenda. Then we are put in a defensive position from square one.
I suggest our default reference be “corrected translation” or “new corrected translation.” By adding the word “corrected” to all references, we teach that the original translations were defective and that this was a repair, not the promotion of an agenda. We communicate the the real reasons for the change from the outset, not in defense against those on the left who ARE promoting an agenda.
(Fr. Z, I’ll even buy a new mug!)
JlovesR
September 4, 2010
Correct
Jjoy
September 4, 2010
an ineffably excellent proposition
Thomas
September 7, 2010
“we teach that the original translations were defective”
I have a problem with this statement. To say that they current translation is “defective” means more than just bad translation, but calls into doubt the validity of the translation. In other words, you are saying that the Roman Catholic Church has not been consecrating the Eucharist, at least in the United States, for the last 30 years. If there is no Eucharist, then there is no Church. Apart from Lefebvrists, I don’t think even your most conservative Catholics would agree to that, even if they jump on the bandwagon of “corrected translation” without seriously considering what that means opposite the “defective” old translation.
Robin
September 9, 2010
It’s very easy to accuse others satirically of following an agenda while claiming to be agenda-free oneself. I wonder why, if the current version is so defective, nobody was pointing this until very recently, when the pro-EF agenda got going.
I hold no particular brief for the current version (all translations are always unsatisfactory to some extent – traduttore traditore) and merely think that if English-speaking people are going to be put to the trouble of getting used to a new text of the Mass (not to mention the vast expense of replacing books), one might expect the new version would at least be an improvement in its quality of English. As a Latin teacher I find it for the most part wooden, stilted, artificial and unnatural – as English. Correctness in translation is not just a matter of faithfulness to the meaning of the original, but also entails faithfulness to the language into which you are translating, its idioms, characteristic forms of sentence structure, morphology etc. – ‘Liturgiam authenticam’ quite fails to address such questions of the theory of translation, which may be why the new version is so defective as a translation.