VATICAN CITY - In Italian the verbs "to translate" and "to betray" sound very similar and have given birth to the adage, "To translate is to betray."
Msgr. Juan Miguel Ferrer Grenesche, undersecretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, cited the saying in an interview Aug. 9 with the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, about the task of translating Mass texts and the Bible.
English-speaking bishops are about to see stacks of new Roman Missals, the fruit of their long labors in commissioning, perfecting and obtaining Vatican approval for a new English translation of the prayers used at Mass. The Italian bishops' conference continues working on its new translation of the missal while the French bishops are working on both the missal and a new translation of the Bible, Msgr. Ferrer said.
He told the Vatican newspaper that the whole "translator-betrayer" idea "is true to a great extent since the translator, even if involuntarily, can betray the text because it's not easy to faithfully transmit a text in another language."
"On the one hand, you must be faithful to the original and to the author's expressions; on the other, you must respect the genius of the language into which the text is being translated," he said.
"It's not an easy balance to reach," the monsignor said.
After the Second Vatican Council, he said, liturgical translation efforts in almost every language tended to focus on "preparing versions that would be beautiful" and adapted to the local language.
The translations lost some of their fidelity to the original Latin text of the Mass prayers, particularly when the Latin text strongly echoed important writings of the early church fathers or of traditional theological formulations, he said.
"So, after 40 years of translations, a need was seen to underline this aspect that had been neglected, even if it meant losing some of the modernity of the language and literary beauty," Msgr. Ferrer said.
"One must consider that in our society, people no longer know Latin and so it takes greater effort to draw closer to fidelity to the original," he said.
