gloriousthing



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1.1 Page 1

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A Glorious Thing
The translator’s priestly task
January 14, 2014

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Contents
1 The letter and the spirit
8
1.1 Metaphors for translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2 Glory with guts
14
2.1 Loss and levels of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.1.1 Getting to grips with education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2 Hemingway can teach us something . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3 Untying the knots
26
3.1 Emerging metaphors and tricky terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.2 Notes on an L2 text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4 Sounds and symbols of the translator’s habitat
35
4.1 Notes on an L1 text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.2 Fascination with lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
5 When notizie are not the news
43
5.1 ANS, lexical bundles, phrase patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5.2 False friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
5.3 Terminology and translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
6 Translating the charism
57
6.1 Strenna Stress: handing down a tough sentence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
6.2 When translations are considered originals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
6.3 A rose by any other name ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other genres of holiness
68
7.1 Iconographic discourse and hyperbole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
7.2 Translating the 19th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
8 Digital-e(a)se
76
8.1 Digital is today’s lingua franca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
8.2 “The apple ate the boy” or, “Thank God for Google!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
8.2.1 Using digital aids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
8.2.1.1 Addons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
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Contents
8.2.1.2 Standalone tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
8.2.1.3 The cloud - back to Google . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
8.2.2 A possible digital workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
8.2.3 Salesian Italian – a final comment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
9 APPENDIX Translator’s style guide
86
9.1 General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.1.1 Language usage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.1.2 Quoting text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.2 Spelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.2.1 Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.2.1.1 British spelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.2.1.2 Words in -ise/-ize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.2.1.3 The -yse form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
9.2.1.4 Digraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
9.2.1.5 Double consonants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
9.2.1.6 Carcass/carcase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
9.2.1.7 Input/output. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
9.2.1.8 -ct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.2.1.9 Some weights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.2.1.10 Some measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.2.1.11 A(n) historical. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.2.1.12 Judgment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.2.1.13 Tricky plurals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.3 Interference effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
9.3.1 Noun/verb or noun/adjective confusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
9.3.2 Confusion between English and Italian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
9.4 Capital letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
9.4.1 Capitalisation – general. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
9.4.2 Long names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.4.3 Subsequent references to names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.4.4 Translations of names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.4.5 State or state? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.4.6 Seasons, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.4.7 Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.4.8 Celestial bodies and objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
9.4.9 Generic terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
9.4.10 Proprietary names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
9.4.11 Derivations from proper nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
9.4.12 All capitals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
9.4.13 Initial capitals in quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
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Contents
9.5 Geographical names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9.5.1 General. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9.5.2 Orthography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9.5.3 Names of regions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9.5.4 Rivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9.5.5 Seas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9.5.6 Lakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.7 Strait/straits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.8 Islands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.9 Mountains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.10 Valleys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.11 Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.12 Non-literal geographical names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
9.5.13 Compass points. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9.5.14 Compound compass points. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9.6 Hyphens and compound words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9.6.1 General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9.6.2 Adverb-adjective modifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9.6.3 Adjective from noun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
9.6.4 Compounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9.6.5 Prefixes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9.6.6 Nouns from phrasal verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9.6.7 Present participles of phrasal verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9.6.8 Avoiding double consonants and vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9.6.9 Numbers and fractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
9.6.10 Prefixes before proper names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
9.6.11 Coordination of compounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
9.7 Punctuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
9.7.1 General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
9.7.2 Full stop (period) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
9.7.2.1 Full stops as omission marks (aka ellipsis points). . . . . . 98
9.7.3 Colon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
9.7.4 Semicolon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
9.7.5 Comma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
9.7.5.1 Linked sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
9.7.5.2 Parenthetic and introductory phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
9.7.5.3 Non-defining relative clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
9.7.5.4 Combined uses of commas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
9.7.5.5 Avoiding commas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
9.7.6 Dashes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.7.6.1 Dashes vs hyphens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.7.6.2 Em dashes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
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Contents
9.7.6.3 En dashes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.7.7 Brackets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.7.7.1 Round brackets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.7.7.2 Round brackets in citations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.7.7.3 Bracketed sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.7.4 Square brackets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.8 Question mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.8.1 Courtesy questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.9 Exclamation mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.10 Quotation marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.10.1 Double vs single quotation marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.10.2 Placing of quotation marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.7.10.3 Short quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.10.4 Block quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.10.5 English text in source documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.10.6 Back-translating of quotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.10.7 So-called . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.11 Apostrophe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.11.1 Possessive of nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.7.11.2 Nouns ending in -s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
9.7.11.3 Contractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
9.7.11.4 Plurals of abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
9.7.11.5 Plurals of figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
9.7.11.6 Plurals of single letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
9.8 Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.8.1 General. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.8.2 Figures and measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.8.3 Hundreds and thousands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.8.4 Writing out numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.8.4.1 Single digit plus word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.8.4.2 Adjacent numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.4.3 Compound numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.4.4 Grouping of thousands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.4.5 Billion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.4.6 Abbreviating ‘million’ and ‘billion’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.5 Fractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.5.1 Written out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
9.8.5.2 Decimal points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.8.5.3 Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.8.6 Ranges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.8.6.1 Written out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.8.6.2 Abbreviated form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
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9.8.7 Dates and times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.8.7.1 Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.8.7.2 Avoiding redundancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
9.8.7.3 Decades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
9.8.7.4 Systems of chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
9.8.7.5 Time spans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
9.8.7.6 Time of day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
9.9 Abbreviations and symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
9.9.1 Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
9.9.1.1 General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
9.9.1.2 Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
9.9.1.3 Writing acronyms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
9.9.1.4 Writing initialisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
9.9.1.5 Writing truncations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
9.9.1.6 Plurals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.9.1.7 Foreign-language abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.9.1.8 Use of e.g. and i.e. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.9.1.9 Specific recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.10 Mathematical symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.10.1 Foreign-language conventions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
9.10.1.1 Multiplication sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.10.1.2 Division sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.10.1.3 Open dashes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.10.1.4 Technical tolerances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.10.1.5 Per cent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.10.1.6 Percentages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
9.11 Scientific symbols and units of measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.11.1 General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.11.2 Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.12 Foreign imports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.12.1 Foreign words and phrases in English text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.12.2 Personal names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.12.3 Quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.12.4 Latin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.12.5 Romanisation systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.12.5.1 Greek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.12.5.2 Cyrillic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.12.5.3 Arabic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.12.5.4 Chinese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.13 Parts of speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.13.1 Adjectives and adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.13.1.1 Biannual/biennial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
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9.13.1.2 here-/there- adverbs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9.13.1.3 Singular or plural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
9.13.1.4 Plural country names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
9.13.1.5 Words in -ics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
9.13.1.6 A statistic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
9.13.1.7 Present perfect/simple past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
9.13.1.8 Tenses in minutes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
9.13.1.9 Sequence of tenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
9.13.1.10Streamlining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
9.13.1.11Auxiliaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
9.13.1.12Split infinitive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
9.13.1.13The gerund and the possessive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
9.14 Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
9.14.1 Word processors can help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
9.14.2 Lists of short items (without main verbs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
9.14.3 Where each item completes the introductory sentence: . . . . . . . 118
9.14.4 Complete statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
9.14.5 Several sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
9.15 Gender-neutral language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
9.15.1 He/she . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
9.15.2 Noun forms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
9.16 Church and religious matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
9.16.1 The word ‘church’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
9.16.2 God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
9.16.3 Titles of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
9.16.4 Titles of Places and Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
9.16.5 Citing Scripture References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
9.16.6 Citing Vatican Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
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Figure 1.1: Through a glass, darkly
I went this morning to your Church for mass
And preached according to my simple wit;
It wasn’t all on texts from Holy Writ
For that’s too hard for you as I suppose,
And I prefer to paraphrase or glose.
Gloseing’s a glorious thing, and anyway
“The letter killeth” as we clerics say.
— The Summoner, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, translated from Middle English
This collection of essays on the translator’s task, and especially the Salesian translator’s
task, will take the view that the very act of translation/interpretation itself is a glorious thing,
gloss (‘glose’) or no gloss and that, according to circumstances, it will range somewhere
along the spectrum between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’, like most of human endeavour. It is also a
priestly task, in the words of a contemporary Irish-Canadian writer responding to someone
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who asked her what first came to mind about those who translated her books: ‘Priestly,
tireless dedication to getting it right.’ (Emma Donoghue). It is priestly for much more than
just ‘getting it right’, but that is a good start.
Chaucer’s is a cautionary tale for preachers and for translators too, I would say, for
‘gloseing’s a glorious thing’ for them or can be, though not in the sarcastic tone of the
Summoner’s ‘glorious’ nor, for that matter, in what he meant by ‘glossing’. Our Summoner
is attacking the preacher’s penchant for explaining away the Holy Writ he is bound to
faithfully expound, and no translator would want to admit to that! ‘Glossing’ however, has
other meanings for the translator. A ‘gloss translation’ attempts to stay close to formal
equivalence, a strategy whereby form and content are as close as possible to the source.
Or the translator might use the term ‘gloss’ in its linguistic sense of choosing the correct
target word/gloss for the source term. It can also mean a (usually last-ditch) strategy of
explaining something by way of a translator’s note.
As for ‘The letter killeth’, that was Voltaire’s view too:
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken
the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the
spirit gives life. (On Tragedy, letter 18, Letters on England 1732).
The received and popular wisdom regarding translation is that it must be anything but a
glorious and priestly task. It sounds boring and must obviously be a hard slog. Requests
may arrive at any hour and in the Internet age from any quarter, usually with firm deadlines.
Translation takes time – there are few short cuts despite technological aids, and if it is a
large work, say a book of 200 or more pages, then it is something like climbing a mountain;
you put one foot after the other and eventually get there. The view at the top, however, is
a glorious one!
A rule of thumb might be two pages an hour (A4, typewritten) for a reasonably fast
and hopefully accurate translator, but that will vary depending on content and form. The
normal daily requests for translations are shorter items but might still run to 10, 20 or
more pages in some cases, and that is just considering translation as a written task.
Oral translation, or more correctly interpretation, is another set of skills altogether and
may occupy lengthy periods if conferences or general chapters are involved. Salesian
translators or interpreters, we know, do it out of love or obedience (perhaps that should
read ‘love and obedience’), and in the rare case where for want of either, or just plain want
of a ‘free’ translator (free as in beer and speech) one has to shell out real money, well that
is an inglorious situation indeed! Out-sourced translation, and even more so, real-time
interpreting, can cost a pretty penny.
Our view then of glory, spirit, priestliness where translation is concerned may well
come down to the metaphors we live by and are perhaps unconscious of. What are our
metaphors for translation/interpretation and the role of the translator/interpreter?
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1.1 Metaphors for translation
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know
in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now stays faith,
hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians
13:12-13 KJV).
Not all metaphors for translation are religious; in fact most of them are not. Does the
translator vest a text in new clothes, or conquer it? Is translation a bridge between cultures
or like an artist painting a portrait? Is it the back of a tapestry, as Cervantes said? Maybe
it is all those things or none of them, but whatever we think it is, there is a good chance
that this is what the translator actually believes he or she is doing, meaning it is not just
a question of the metaphors we use, but the method they inform. If our metaphor is a
religious one, there is little doubt it will influence the way we translate or interpret: we will
believe we are doing something religious.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from which the opening citation has been taken, is an
interesting introduction to the religious view of translation. Of course the quote above is
also a translation — from Middle English. What Chaucer actually said was,
Glosynge is a glorious thyng, certeyn, For lettre sleeth, so as we clerkes seyn,
which is why we need to translate it for most of today’s readers. From what we can
tell, Chaucer made extensive use of the Vulgate Bible, so effectively he was a translator.
He also translated from Boccaccio (the Knight’s Tale draws substantially from Boccaccio’s
Latin Teseide). So what did he think about ‘glossing’, really? The word ‘gloss’ in Chaucer’s
Middle English encompasses the same extremes of meaning that are still present in mod-
ern English; it can either mean to explain something or it can mean to ignore or explain
something away, as in ‘to gloss over.’ In the former sense, Chaucer sometimes distin-
guishes between a text and an interpretive account of the text. More often than not,
however, Chaucer’s use of ‘gloss’ carries the second meaning of ‘to gloss over.’ But what
Chaucer often does by indulging in glossing himself is to probe the limits and authority of
biblical texts in poetry. In other words we have translator-poet and ‘glossator’ if one could
coin that term. Translation is beginning to look like a complex and interesting task!
The well-known KJV translation for Paul’s comment on the state of our knowledge in
1 Corinthians 13:12-13 is not the first biblical image of translation that would come to
mind for most people. The first, if we are honest, would probably be Babel, and not only
because we might be of religious and scriptural bent. Babel has been largely detached
from its biblical origins in modern day digital forays into translation, though we might want
to feel that Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) begat BabelFish
and BabelFish begat online translation and online translation begat Google Translate . . .
However, returning to the real Babel, translation as a necessary but impossible task made
obvious by the primal scattering of languages is a well-worn metaphor with some famous
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names behind it (George Steiner, Jacques Derrida to mention two). It does not wear well
today, though, for many reasons, its patriarchal presumptions being a prominent one.
When the King James translation of the Bible emerged in 1611 there was little reflection
on translation theory as such. The KJV was an Anglican effort, but St Jerome’s ‘method’
as explained in his Letter to Pammachius had been pretty much taken for granted for
twelve centuries already, and friend Chaucer would have been well aware of it:
For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the
Greek (except in the case of the holy scriptures where even the order of the
words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word. (St
Jerome, Letter LVII, available from http://www.tertullian.org)
The difference was that by then, and possibly much earlier in Chaucer’s case, the ‘except
in the case of the holy scriptures’ had been conveniently overlooked, and the KJV went
for what Eugene Nida, a well-known name in biblical translation issues today, would call
‘dynamic equivalence’. They translated what made sense for them: a ‘glass’ in 1611 was
a rather imperfect mirror just as Paul’s probably brass ‘mirror’ was for him. The mirrors
of the ancients were of polished metal, and in many cases were of brass and required
constant polishing, so that a sponge with pounded pumice-stone was generally attached
to them. The Church in Corinth was famous for the manufacture of these kinds of mirrors.
The images reflected in these brass mirrors were indistinct in comparison to our modern
mirrors. They were seen ‘darkly’ which, literally translated from the Greek in which Paul
wrote, meant in a riddle or enigma — the revelation appears indistinctly, imperfectly. But
that is a different metaphor from the one suggested to us today by a ‘glass darkly’, since
we immediately think of a clouded window. It is singularly difficult to translate this passage
from Greek since modern mirrors give the impression of perfect reflection, and the original
meaning is lost.
Either way, though, Paul was not offering us a metaphor on translation as such, unless
we want to tie it to the Incarnation and the glorious moment in the future when every
single human being on earth will suddenly face Him — Jesus! — without a veil, without
obscurity, Face to Face. At the very least we could say that this has lifted ‘translation’ to
sublime heights! And translation can also work the other way — it can inspire holy and
wholesome thoughts, as it did for John Donne:
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does
belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that
child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted
into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that
action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when
one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into
a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs
several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness,
some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his
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hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every
book shall lie open to one another. (John Donne, Meditation XVII)
Since much of the practical material which will appear later in this collection is to do with
a single language pair, and in a single direction (IT > EN), it could be interesting to note
whether there are any hidden metaphors in either the Italian or English perceptions of the
translation/interpretation act. It becomes immediately obvious that there are: compare
‘translate’ with tradurre. The only common element is the first morpheme, ‘trans/tra’. The
English term is somewhat passive, the Italian far more active, since it implies actually
leading someone or something across. If we go back to ancient Rome, and Cicero is
probably our best source of information for this, we discover that ‘inelegant interpreters
. . . render word from word.’ Cicero on the other hand considered himself an orator, and
he would ‘usually use many words to expose what is expressed by one word of Greek if I
am unable to do anything else.’ (De finibus 3.15.10). Or elsewhere, he repeats the same
idea, claiming to work ‘not as an interpres but as an orator.’ (De optimo genere oratorum,
IV, 14), by which he meant partly that he was a free rather than a literal translator, but
also that it was a fit occupation for a free-born Roman gentleman who had mastered the
skills of rhetoric in order to argue eloquently in the law-courts and the Senate. It might
be Cicero’s vanity, but there is a hint of glory here. There was also a hint of glory in the
subsequent Roman view that translation had much to do with the survival of the Empire,
from which we draw the notion of translator as conqueror.
Translation, properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communi-
cation . . . [and] inside or between languages, human communication equals
translation (George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation,
Oxford University Press, 1975).
Again a hint of something more glorious than the tedium and trial that so many people
think translators must endure. The translator as communicator seems to be emerging
here. It is also a notion that uplifts the role of the translator. Just read what the Salesian
Social Communication System (SSCS, Rome, 2011) has to say about communication in
sections 2.1 and 2.2:
... consistency between the intentional message and the messages actually
sent via what is done and what in fact is. (SSCS 2.1)
on the one hand, and reference to Communio et Progressio no. 11 on the other:
He [Jesus] utterly identified Himself with those who were to receive His com-
munication and He gave His message not only in words but in the whole man-
ner of His life. He spoke from within, that is to say, from out of the press of
His people. He preached the Divine message without fear or compromise. He
adjusted to His people’s way of talking and to their patterns of thought. And
He spoke out of the predicament of their time. (SSCS 2.2)
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Both of these comments on communication, one in general and one on Jesus the Perfect
Communicator in particular, have relevance to the role of the translator today, particularly
if we wish to see it as a priestly task.
Two prominent religious figures in today’s world have promoted the idea that translation
is a divine mission. The view taken by both Lammin Sanneh (Gambian born Muslim,
now professor of Missions, World Christianity and history at Yale Divinity School, and a
practising Catholic), and Andrew Walls OBE (Scottish Presbyterian, currently Professor of
the History of Mission at Liverpool Hope University, Honorary Professor at the University
of Edinburgh, Research Professor at Africa International University’s Center for World
Christianity) is that the Incarnation was an act of translation, Christianity is a translated
religion and has been a force for translation throughout history — most languages have
grammars and dictionaries because of the work of Christian missionaries.
Anybody who knows anything about Salesian missions and missionaries around the
world over 135 or more years knows that despite being Johnny-come-latelies in the his-
tory of Christian missions, this Salesian contribution to languages and cultures has been
notable. Think North-East Indian hill tribes, the Shuar of Ecuador, Achuar of Peru, the
Xavantes in Brazil, just for starters.
Thus, translators be proud! Yours is a metaphor for mission, a ministry and a glorious,
priestly act!
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Figure 2.1: Translators are intercultural mediators
Fr Pascual Chávez, ninth successor of Don Bosco, in his letter on inculturation (Acts of
the General Council no. 411) states, quoting John Paul II:
... there is no salvation without incarnation, nor is there incarnation without
inculturation. Affirming, therefore, ‘the natural missionary role of the Church
means essentially bearing witness to the fact that the task of inculturation, as
the total spreading of the Gospel and its subsequent translation in thought and
life still continues today and constitutes the heart, the means and the scope of
the new evangelisation.’
This, however, in the context of a letter on inculturation of the Salesian charism. The use of
the term ‘translation’ is not misplaced here, especially if we also consider that there can be
no inculturation without translation. At a practical level there is simply no doubt: key texts
of the Salesian charism, the Congregation’s major websites, international meetings of the
Salesian Family, just to name some of the Salesian translator’s tasks, have all required
translation or interpretation services, and the need is increasing.
Because of the focus on missionary activity in the Congregation, there have been cer-
tain regions (e.g. America South Cone, South Asia) where translation needs and re-
sponses have been prominent in the past. These days we look upon every region, every
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Salesian as ‘missionary’, so we need thoughtful, reflective translators who are aware that
it is a Gospel and a charism they are translating, and that they are at the very least oper-
ating as inter-cultural mediators.
Other than the belief that translation is a ministry essential to our mission, and that
it is a glorious, priestly task, there are corollaries to this. Glory without guts is hard to
come by, and by ‘guts’ here I am employing a metaphor that I want to mean all that is
‘incarnational’: hard work, getting our hands dirty and even getting it wrong from time to
time! If translation involves both guts and glory, it is going to be a powerful act. That can
include it being a manipulative one — there was even a ‘cannibalisation’ metaphor in use
at one stage where the original text is ‘consumed’ by the translator and reproduced as his
or her own. We would not want to admit to that either, but in the world in which we live and
move today and as part of the profession, for that is what it is, translators are increasingly
gaining greater attention from readers as a visible agent in the production of texts. This is
not because they are intruding in gross kinds of ways through footnotes, or hijacking the
text in front of them but because they believe that they need to create something beautiful
and worthy of the original for their target audience who live in another place and a different
culture to the person responsible for the original. This might become clearer as we take
some real text and look at how we could/should translate it.
Having just said that and implied something of a value-added approach to the task,
which may have the reader bothered at this point, let me balance it with another statement:
any translation will inevitably result in loss at some level. By level here, I mean what the
linguist would think of as levels of a text (spoken or written): a phonic/graphic level to do
with the letters, or sounds employed by the original — a prosodic or musical/lyrical level
to do with the way the text sounds if read out or spoken. Don’t for one minute think that
these two levels are not important in some Salesian translations. Consider the video script
for the Strenna, for example, which may contain these elements, especially if there is a
narrative or a poem involved as there often is.
2.1 Loss and levels of language
There is the grammatical level (which I will extend to include words or lexis, which the
linguist would strictly have as a separate level) and this level with its phrases, word order,
tense, aspect issues is always a challenge for translation, but add to that the sentential
level, or the complete idea or statement (which may be just one word and a punctuation
mark) and the tricky discourse or intertextual level; that ‘something’ about the text that
creates a sense of cohesion and coherence. What if the original (and believe me, this
does happen at times) is actually faulty in this latter regard? What is the translator’s guide
here? To reproduce the faultiness, e.g. poor cohesion and incoherence, or follow the
original author’s obvious intention to want to produce something of beauty? These things
happen at the highest levels. The Vatican and official translation of the Pope’s message
to the Salesian 26th General Chapter was a case in point. The Italian original said:
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Non vi può essere un’ardente mistica senza una robusta ascesi che la sostenga
...
And the Vatican’s translation of that read:
There can be no ardent mystic without a vigorous ascesis that sustains him.
The la refers to mistica. It can refer to nothing else. And mistica is not a mystic (the Pope
was not speaking to women religious when addressing us). What should the translation
be?
There cannot be a passionate mystical dimension without a solid asceticism
to support it.
It is no minor point we are dealing with here; does one quote an official translation in error,
or an unofficial one which is correct? Or maybe we could just adopt the view of Argentinian
writer Jorge Luis Borges, who famously said on one occasion: ‘El original no es fiel a la
traducción’ !
So by saying that any translation will inevitably result in loss at some level, quite apart
from the kind of mistranslation indicated above, I am really saying that there can never
be 100% equivalence between source text and target text. Sometimes we may have
improved on the source by highlighting one level in the target, but this will mean losing out
on another. The translator is always aware of ‘loss’ in this ‘not 100%’ sense and aims to
reduce this loss to the least degree.
The criterion of translation is not to be the same but to be like, such that the author
of the original (if he or she were able to) could say ‘yes, that’s what I meant’, and the
reader can trust that the information in the original has been preserved. The force of
the original also needs to be transferred to the text in the language and mindset that the
reader is at home with but which is inevitably different from the source. Why ‘inevitably’?
Because no two languages are the same, and no two people are the same and no two
cultures are the same. Translation did not come after Babel but when God created Adam
and Eve! And no, I am not suggesting that our biblical forebears spoke Parseltongue!
As one prominent member of the profession has said in a recent book. ‘Translation is
a first step towards civilisation. It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides
incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and communicate. We should do
more of it!’ (Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by
David Bellos, Faber & Faber, 2012).
2.1.1 Getting to grips with education
(educatore, educazione, istruzione, formazione, professionale, scuola media, ginnasio,
liceo, istituto, pedagogia, scienze di ... )
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For the reader who is wondering when we will start being practical and helpful, now
might be a good place to begin with one of the more bedevilling areas in Salesian trans-
lation — education. Of course it is at the heart of our charism, so we are vitally interested
in it, but oh how difficult it can be, at times, to adequately translate terms relating to edu-
cation. It is in this broad field that the comment ‘no two languages are the same, and no
two people are the same and no two cultures are the same’ begins to stand out.
Let’s begin with ‘educator’. When we find the term ‘educator’ in Salesian discourse, and
we find it often, we need to bear in mind that the concept in Italian is wider than in English.
Whereas in English the concept has a + SPECIALIST feature (hence teacher, administrator
of a school, someone who has studied the theory, etc.) in Italian, an educatore could be
a parent, parish priest or other non-specialist in the field of education. A Salesian is an
educator (and pastor) by dint of religious profession, not because of some particular study
of the field, though in almost every instance this latter would eventually apply.
There are a number of associated terms in Salesian discourse which are traps for the
unwary, since they tend to be somewhat special usages. The normal adjectival form for
‘education’ in English is ‘educational’ whereas Salesian discourse may use educativo/a
translated as ‘educative’, as in ‘the Educative and Pastoral Community’ (which in Italian
is achieved with a hyphen best avoided in English: Comunità educativo-pastorale). It
might also be worth repeating here that, especially for derivatives, the Italian concept of
education is broader than the English one and will sometimes be expressed as istruzione
and at other times as formazione. They are broadly synonymous. We find ‘education
to love’ (The term finds its basis in the Salesian Constitutions on chastity where the vow
renders the person ‘capable of educating them to love and to purity’, but the precise term
comes from GC23. no. 192); ‘education to faith’, a term which was given its particular
contemporary force by GC23. And finally, a defining feature of belonging to the Salesian
Family is “because of the education received”. Here again, the idea derives from the wider
concept in Italian — which means that someone who has attended an oratory or for that
matter even been a parishioner, has equal standing with someone who went to a Salesian
school in this regard.
If formazione is at least partly synonymous with education, then we need to carefully
note the context where this term is being used. Italian is much more likely to speak of for-
mazione where English might use ‘education’, but the terms formazione and educazione
are broadly interchangeable in Italian, and refer especially to the gaining of attitudes and
understanding. Obviously the term is also applied to religious formation. So what do we
do when we come to the term Centro Formazione Professionale or similar? There has
been a tendency to translate this directly as a Professional Formation Centre, but in fact,
such centres are almost inevitably what we would call Vocational Training Centres, and
that is how it should be translated. When we see the term professionale in our literature,
it is a good bet that it is in reference to vocational education, trades and the like. Orien-
tamento vocazionale may have two quite distinct contexts, though: it may refer to what
we would call ‘vocational guidance’ in English but in reference to guiding young people
to choice of a career (‘career guidance’ avoids the ambiguity, then) or it may also refer to
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discernment of a potential religious vocation. Only context will tell.
We are not quite finished. We have a long history in education, and it can be quite
difficult to accurately translate the various education systems that have obtained in Italy
since Don Bosco’s time till our own. In historical terms, it all began (on an Italian-wide
basis, that is) in 1859, with the Casati Act (Legge Casati), so more or less coincides
with the time when Don Bosco was beginning to get very active in formal education. The
next major shift was in 1923 (under Mussolini), then again in 1962 and finally in 1999,
following the Bologna process, a new arrangement for university education. There are
other influences, too, at an EU level, for example the Erasmus programme.
But the terms that cause us most problems are ones like scuola media, liceo, ginnasio,
and their various levels or approaches (liceo classico, scientifico, and not only, since they
include art, technology also today in this list). Many of these terms go back to the origi-
nal Casati legislation, and are still with us, even though by now, 2014, there are entirely
different ways of describing things: secondary education is now divided into two stages:
Scuola secondaria di primo grado (lower secondary school), also known as Scuola me-
dia, which corresponds broadly to the Middle School grades, and Scuola secondaria di
secondo grado (upper secondary school), which corresponds to the senior school level.
The Scuola secondaria di primo grado lasts three years (roughly from age 11 to 13), and
provides further education on the subjects studied at the scuola primaria (primary school,
obviously), with the addition of technology and a language other than English (typically
French, Spanish or German). The curriculum is the same for all schools. At the end of the
third year students sit an exam which enables them to continue their education. It used
be called Scuola media di primo grado or Scuola media inferiore.
The Scuola secondaria di secondo grado today lasts five years even though some istituti
professionali (vocational centres, recall) might offer a diploma after only three years. Every
tier involves an exam at the end of the final year, called Esame di Maturità, required to
gain a diploma and have access to further education.
The secondary school situation varies, since there are several types of schools differ-
entiated by subjects and activities. The main division is between the Liceo, the Istituto
Tecnico and the Istituto Professionale. Any kind of secondary school that lasts 5 years
grants access to the final exam, called Esame di Stato conclusivo del corso di studio di
Istruzione Secondaria Superiore or Esame di Maturità. This exam takes place every year
between June and July and grants access to University.
The "Liceo" concept was created by Gentile in 1923 and indicated a specific type of
secondary school. You really can end up with any number of schools here:
• Liceo Classico, which features Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, history and philosophy
as its most important subjects.
• Liceo Linguistico puts emphasis on modern foreign languages learning and the lan-
guages usually taught are English, French, Spanish and German — although re-
cently Russian, Arabic and Chinese have been introduced as well.
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• Liceo delle Scienze Umane, where the emphasis is more on relational, behavioural,
educational and legal topics, such as pedagogy, anthropology, psychology, sociol-
ogy, law, political economy and social research. It replaces the previous Istituto
Magistrale (which once educated elementary school teachers).
• Liceo Scientifico, whose programme recalls the Liceo Classico in teaching Italian,
Latin, history and philosophy but is more oriented towards mathematics, physics,
chemistry, biology, Earth science and computer science and is also focused on draw-
ing and art history.
• Liceo Artistico, which is oriented toward arts teaching — both in a theoretical (i.e.
art history) and practical (i.e. drawing sessions) way. Its subjects are painting,
sculpture, decoration, graphics, design, audiovisual, multimedia, scenography and
architecture.
• Liceo Musicale e Coreutico, which comprises two sectors: musicale, which spe-
cialises in music and teaches students to play an instrument, Coreutico, which spe-
cialises in dance and choreography.
The Istituto Tecnico (Technical Institute), divided into ITT (istituto tecnico tecnologico,
i.e. Technical/Technological Institute) and ITE (istituto tecnico economico, i.e. Techni-
cal/Economic Institute), is more oriented toward practical subjects, such as jurisdiction,
accountancy, tourism, metalworking, electronics, chemical industry, biotechnology, visual
communication, fashion and food industry, construction management and geotechnics.
The Istituto Professionale offers a form of secondary education oriented towards prac-
tical subjects and enables the students to start searching for a job as soon as they have
completed their studies (sometimes sooner, as some schools offer a diploma after 3 years
instead of 5) and is even more specific in terms of vocational course offerings than the
Istituto Tecnico.
The Istituto d’Arte was a particular form of Istituto Professionale, which offered an edu-
cation focused on art history and drawing. Today it is part of the Liceo Artistico.
The Italian school system also features the Scuola serale (evening school, for which we
can partly thank Don Bosco), aimed at adults and working students.
Confused? You have every right to be! Maybe it would be helpful to keep the following
simple ideas in mind in translation:
• scuola media — think secondary school, perhaps Middle School. Don’t get too
excited about variations like Terza media. It will be students around 13-14-15 years
of age.
• ginnasio — historically it covered all of secondary school in preparation for liceo.
Think ’high school’ without going into too many details. If you have to, then Quinta
ginnasio might be about Grade 9 or Year 3 or whatever your system calls that middle
secondary level.
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• liceo — think senior high school, whatever you call it in your system (16 or 17 years
up)
Then there are just a few other terms you may meet when trying to discern public and
private education. A ginnasio parificato would be a private high school but with govern-
ment (education department) recognition, otherwise it would be a ginnasio statale. If you
come across obbligo scolastico (or formativo) it will be ‘compulsory schooling’. And by
the way, politiche scolastiche are only obliquely connected with ’politics’. The word means
’policies’ in that context.
A word of caution with terms like istituto, pedagogia, scienze di educazione. An ANS
news item might often refer to an istituto salesiano. Assume in 99% of cases that it is a
school and prefer that word to ‘institute’. Istituto, in Italian, means ‘establishment’ amongst
other things, so a more general term. An istituto d’arte e mestieri is a school of arts and
trades. Pedagogia may well be ‘pedagogy’ but it may also just be ‘education’. And a
Faculty of Scienze di educazione will be an ‘Education Faculty’. No need to translate
scienze.
2.2 Hemingway can teach us something
(Economo, Rettor maggiore, Responsabile maggiore, Pastorale giovanile, persone, realtà,
situazione, orizzonte, prospettiva, stringente, suggestivamente, dolcezza, in effetti, infatti
...)
"How are you, baby? How do you feel? I bring you this — " It was a bottle of
cognac. The orderly brought a chair and he sat down, "and good news. You
will be decorated. They want to get you the medaglia d’argento but perhaps
they can get only the bronze."
"What for?"
"Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any
heroic act you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me
exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?"
"No," I said. "I was blown up while we were eating cheese."
"Be serious. You must have done something heroic either before or after.
Remember carefully."
"I did not."
"Didn’t you carry anybody on your back? Gordini says you carried several peo-
ple on your back but the medical major at the first post declares it is impossible.
He has to sign the proposition for the citation."
"I didn’t carry anybody. I couldn’t move."
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"That doesn’t matter," said Rinaldi.
He took off his gloves.
"I think we can get you the silver. Didn’t you refuse to be medically aided before
the others?"
"Not very firmly."
"That doesn’t matter. Look how you are wounded. Look at your valorous
conduct in asking to go always to the first line. Besides, the operation was
successful."
"Did they cross the river all right?"
"Enormously. They take nearly a thousand prisoners. It’s in the bulletin. Didn’t
you see it?"
"No."
"I’ll bring it to you. It is a successful coup de main."
(Ernest Hemingway, A Call to Arms, 1929)
Pioneering a technique that he would use even more masterfully in his Spanish Civil War
novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway offers us a novel in A Call to Arms
that plays on the linguistic gap between Italian and English, which he uses in this case
to mirror the confusion of war. He has an American fighting for the Italians in the First
World War, so he needs to present him speaking English for English readers, and he also
needs Italians speaking in a way that shows they spoke very good Italian, but in English!
The passage above is indicative of the quality of dialogue whereby he achieves this. His
character, Frederic Henry, also had to speak Italian but was allowed to make mistakes, and
his accent gave him away anyway. At one point his own officers thought he might have
been German and nearly executed him. A doctor treating him thought he was French. A
barber thought he might be an Austrian officer. A southern Italian sergeant thought he
might be a northerner, and a bartender thought he was a South American!
This is excellent stuff for a translator to read! But being congratulated for achieving a
level of prose worthy of Hemingway (in this instance) would be a left-handed compliment,
and besides, there is enough evidence that he wasn’t that great a linguist anyway!
And yet we have a good number of Hemingwayesque items in English amongst our
Salesian translations over the years, often perhaps because in earlier times the mission-
aries were not native speakers of English but did their best to ‘translate the charism’.
One cannot prove this, but the suspicion as to how we ended up with a firmly entrenched
term like ‘economer’ (a word that cannot be found in the Oxford or Cambridge or Merriam-
Webster dictionaries even if it looks pretty good and its meaning can be guessed in context
easily enough) is that since economo was in use since Don Bosco, it was imported into
English when the first Italian confreres began working in an English language context.
They would not have realised that even following English word formation rules for coining
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a term, nobody had done it before them for that word. It had been done for someone to
arrive at ‘economist’, but not ‘economer’.
And then there is the term ‘Rector Major’ which sounds decidedly odd to anyone outside
the Salesian sphere of influence. It is, of course a calque, a direct import from the Italian
Rettor maggiore which, by the way, can also sound odd in Italian outside Salesian circles,
and often, in both Italian and English, we refer to our ‘Superior General’ when the audience
or readership is non-Salesian, to avoid misunderstanding. ‘Rector Major’ is here to stay as
a term, but it is not a good reason for extending this calque to other roles in the Salesian
Family — the Don Bosco Volunteers, for example, have a Responsabile maggiore, and if
‘Rector Major’ sounds odd to us, then I’m afraid ‘Responsible Major’ is beyond the pale! It
needs to be glossed as ‘Moderator General’ or something along those lines.
It is a little bit like the difference between a white wall and one painted off-white. They
are both white, but you sense the difference. There are other cases, however, where
we can no longer be mistaken. ‘Youth pastoral’ just does not work. There is general
acceptance today that pastorale in this context be translated as ‘ministry’. To do the other
is a plain case of a false cognate, where there might be morphological similarity (the
difference of an ‘e’) but semantically they are black and white!
Today the situation is even more complex, since English is spoken probably by more
people as an ‘other’ language than it is as a ‘native’ and first language, so what I may
regard as ‘off-white’ lexically and syntactically, someone else thinks of as white! I am
referring, obviously to the ‘Englishes’ spoken around the Salesian world.
But let’s take a look at what Hemingway did to contrive this difference in prose.
It was a relatively simple technique when you think about it, and the quoted passage
above shows it all in action, so consider what might happen if a passage of similar length
from one of our own documents were to do similarly.
• word choice
• tense, aspect and mood
• grammar (word order, that sort of thing)
• literal translation of stock phrases
This is the difference between white and off-white, recall, so it may not look so dramatic
on the surface.
Word choice
It starts with ‘baby’ — sounds almost American, as it may have been then, or ‘Globish’
today, but as addressed to a young soldier? Not really.
‘Gravely’ wounded is not inaccurate if that were really the case, but there is a slight
difference between ‘grave’ (death is imminent) and ‘serious’ for the native English speaker;
the brief context available to us in the passage tells us they are swilling cognac and the
wounded man is flippant — his injuries may not even be serious let alone grave!
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Is ‘Remember carefully’ correct? Would not ‘recall’ sound just a bit more native?
Does an army cross a river ‘enormously’?
A ‘proposition’ for a citation sounds a mite pompous to us, but not to an Italian.
There are countless words in Italian which seem to invite literal equivalents in English.
Persone is usually better translated as ‘people’ rather than ‘persons’. Realtà might often
be just ‘thing/s’. Situazione might be ‘circumstance’, and so on. These are words to be
found in the thick of ordinary conversation and text, but there is a stratosphere of terms
in erudite and scholarly Italian which can lead the translator to grasp the nearest calque
or loan word and hope for the best – with inevitable disappointment. Does strenua lotta
mean a strenuous fight? No, it means putting up a brave one. Does stringente mean
stringent? Well, no, it actually means ‘cogent’, ‘persuasive’. Does suggestivamente mean
‘suggestively’? That can cause trouble! It implies ‘meaningfully’ rather than ‘bawdily’. Is
dolce ‘sweet’? It can be, but dolce, dolcemente, dolcezza in our Salesian context often
refers to ‘gentleness’. Is inutile ‘useless’? Yes, often, but in the phrase è inutile ripetere it
probably means ‘pointless’ or ‘redundant’ or ‘no real point in ...’
Tense
‘I bring you this.’ Perfect Italian — present tense to suggest a present action, except
that in English the speaker would have said ‘I have brought you this.’ ‘They take nearly a
thousand prisoners’ is historic present, but English, which does employ this feature, would
not use it in this instance.
Italian has more complicated uses of past tense with conditional tenses and moods than
does English. Lui promise che ci avrebbe messo una buona parola seems to invite the
translation ‘He promised he would have put in a good word’, whereas English uses the
present conditional: ‘He promised he would put in a good word.’
Grammar
When we read ‘asking to go always to the first line’ there is a question of word order:
adverbial position. Similarly, earlier in the passage, ‘get only’ which is good Italian, should
be ‘only get’ to be good English. It goes a little further than this in the case just quoted.
What appears to be grammatically correct other than the word order is in fact not saying
what it should be saying in the light of the previous sentence. The object (you) has been
omitted, partly because the word order adopted would now make it awkward to include
unless ‘you’ is switched for ‘they’.
stock phrases
We are not yet finished with ‘asking to go always to the first line.’ Here is a stock Italian
phrase, prima linea, translated literally as ‘first line’. English might just say ‘the Front.’ We
suspect that ‘first post’ is something similar, and in a war context it is too reminiscent in
English anyway of the ‘Last Post’ which is an entirely different matter!
Hemingway uses this particular technique in all kinds of ways. He has someone say,
elsewhere in the novel, ‘Just as you like’, which is fine in English until you realise it is
come vuoi which would be better translated as ‘You can think what you like!’ Or he has
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a character reply ‘Nothing’ in a situation where an Italian would say di niente, meaning
‘you’re welcome’ or ‘don’t mention it’.
The final phrase in the passage is French, and quite ambiguous: it could mean a swift
attack (it does mean that in the context) but it can also mean a helping hand! And why
include it in this dialogue? It suits Hemingway’s purpose excellently to create a little more
confusion.
In the light of this, it would be our experience that any number of stock phrases in Italian
can play similar havoc with our translations (Cf. also 5.1 further on, which speaks of
‘lexical bundles’). We can have almost instinctual assumptions about words and phrases
and their meaning and use. In other words, in our experience a word or a phrase is always
used in a certain way and therefore when we see it in the source text we don’t really think
about it or consider its context, our brain supplies the usage we have always seen and
moves on. When this happens the chances that we have missed the context and thus
the meaning are pretty good. Hemingway is indirectly showing us the danger of straight
borrowing.
It can be a question of regularly used phrases in expository texts like, for example:
In questo orizzonte di senso — it would be unwise to translate this literally as ‘in this
horizon of meaning’; that sounds either ridiculous or pompous or both. Either orizzonte or
prospettiva will turn up in our texts on a very regular basis in a phrase similar to the one
above, and if translated literally they create a stilted effect on the translation. Consider the
following stock uses of such items as:
Ampliamento di prospettiva: could also be broadening one’s outlook on things
in prospettiva: has a temporal sense, future — in the future, in view of ...
in prospettiva di: with .... in mind
In una prospettiva: with an aim to
ampliare l’orizzonte della ricerca: as used here orizzonte can be scope, bound-
aries, angle (almost anything except ‘horizon’!)
There are many Italian phrases which appear to have simple, literal equivalents but where
adopting that belief creates problems. In considerazione di seems to invite ‘in considera-
tion of’ (which it could be) but very often in context it means ‘on account of this’.
In effetti: try ‘actually’ rather than ‘in effect’, which it almost certainly isn’t, or in some
contexts it may mean ‘That’s right!’ The discourse feel of the phrase is lost if we go for ‘in
effect’.
Infatti often has a different discourse function in Italian than its too obvious translation
has in English. In many instances it would be better translated as ‘indeed’. The English
‘in fact’ looks backward to what has been said while the Italian infatti looks forward to what
is about to be said. Here is a very good example of this from a recent document:
Mi sembra infatti importante non solo informarvi di quanto è stato fatto, ma
anche presentarvi le prospettive di futuro che riusciamo a intravvedere.
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Indeed I think it is important not only to let you know what has been done
but also offer you what we can glimpse of the future.
Or it could be forever translating Italian connectives! That can become tedious and the
translation sounds too heavy. It is much more common for texts in Italian to be explicitly
structured by the use of connectives like e, dunque, magari, pure, appunto, però, tuttavia,
mentre, infatti ... or they may be phrasal in nature, like in tal senso, in modo tale che,
per tali motivi ... In a similar vein, Italian will often introduce qualifying phrases like più o
meno, quà e là which could well be translated literally — or be omitted. An English text
where all these phrases have been translated, and literally too, is off-white compared to
white and at best stilted in style.
As well as a cautionary tale from Chaucer we now have one from Hemingway!
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Figure 3.1: Untying the knots!
Pope Francis, it turns out, is proving a little difficult to translate, at least if La Repubblica
is any example. This prominent Italian newspaper published the English as well as the
Italian original of its chief editor’s interview with the Pope. But there were problems. The
Pope at one point said,
Il Figlio di Dio si è incarnato per infondere nell’anima degli uomini il sentimento
della fratellanza
which LR translated initially as:
The Son of God became incarnate in the souls of men to instill the feeling of
brotherhood.
That is papal heresy enough to warrant an English Inquisition, except that he did not say
that, obviously. Apart from the uomini which our more gender-equal sensitivities might
render as ‘human beings’, the translator simply ignored the per infondere — a silly trans-
lator’s error or something deliberate! There was an outcry of course and this sentence,
along with others, has been amended. More than that — the Vatican website has now
removed the entire interview. That may be for reasons other than translation.
Well, let me put another little quandary where the translator has ignored something, not
the ipsissima verba of something Francis has said but the metaphor with which he said it,
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the difference being that the translator is prepared to explain why he did it! On October 13
2013, the Pope spoke to a crowd in St Peter’s Square for the Year of Faith’s Marian Day.
As La Stampa put it later:
Today’s catechesis was an extraordinary teaching on sin, the effects it has
on the human soul and the role the Virgin Mary plays in untying the painful
knots in our lives. Francis stressed the importance of rejecting hypocrisy, du-
plicity and idolatry and recalled that the way of faith is the way of the Cross.
Yes, Francis used the Italian phrase sciogliere i nodi, a metaphor he then went on to
develop, first of all for any children listening, by suggesting that an act of disobedience
created a little ‘knot’ in their relationship with mum and dad, and then going on to address
the adults about the ‘knot of disbelief’, knots in human relationships etc. At one point he
indicated clearly where he had taken this idea from, citing two sources, one St Irenaeus
(Adversus Haereses III, 22, 4) and the other Lumen Gentium (no. 56).
Sciogliere i nodi does not always have to be translated literally. For example, it appears
in various Italian Bible translations of Mark 7:35 as si sciolse il nodo della sua lingua . . . ,
but in English versions with phrases like: ‘the string (of his tongue) was loosened’ (KJV)
‘the impediment . . . loosened’ (JB) ‘. . . hearing and speech were restored at once’ (ISV).
Note in particular this latter which shifts the metaphor to another level by ‘restoring speech’
rather than ‘loosening an impediment/bond/string’.
Some days later ANS ran an article about the same event, mentioning that a group of
300 ADMA (Mary Help of Christians Association) members were also in St Peter’s Square
that day. It spoke of the papal catechesis but chose not to mention the sciogliere i nodi
metaphor at any point in the article. Then on the 30th October, it ran a second article
about a follow-up event for ADMA in Turin, and the second paragraph ran as follows:
Davanti a circa 300 persone, don Roberto Carelli ha proposto una rilettura
e attualizzazione delle catechesi del Papa, sottolineando il ruolo materno di
Maria nello sciogliere i nodi che bloccano il nostro cammino di fede e di re-
lazione, soprattutto nella vita delle famiglie.
The translator to English translated this as follows:
In the presence of some 300 people, Fr Roberto Carelli offered a re-interpretation
of the Papal catechesis, emphasising Mary’s maternal role in resolving matters
that block our journey of faith and our relationships, especially in family life.
In other words he went more in the direction of, say, the ISV version of Mk 7:35 cited
above, than direct translation of the metaphor. Why? A legitimate translator’s choice,
really: ANS had already provided a full description of the papal catechesis on 13 October
without mentioning the ‘knot’ metaphor, so in that context (that is for people who read
ANS news daily) there seemed no need to mention it since it might have to be further
explained. But it was also a case of Fr Carelli re-interpreting the Papal catechesis. Yet
another reason for being freer in translation in this instance.
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You do not have to agree with the translator’s choice, but it should be acknowledged that
he is ready to defend it. Translation is always a thoughtful act, and, when you consider it,
so much of the language we use as a native speaker just comes automatically: we don’t
think about it. Rarely is that the case for the translator. He or she is always very conscious
of choices.
In fact ‘untying knots’ could in itself be a metaphor for translation, also by acknowledg-
ing that there are certain occasions when the knot has to remain. Some might call that
‘untranslatability’, but I doubt that such really exists. There is always a way to convey
an idea or a piece of information, or a tone or register; it just may not be as literal as
some might expect, and the ‘knottiness’ of the translated product may actually highlight
something about the tone or feel or just the foreignness of the original.
Sometimes, too, we translate for survival or towards maturity (when, for example there
is interaction with new areas of thought and customs). I realise this is an argument from
silence but was Paul doing this when he did not ever mention the term ‘Son of Man’ and
rarely spoke of the ‘Kingdom of God’? Christian preaching and understanding was moving
beyond the category of Messiah which, for many of the early believers, must have seemed
like the very core of the Gospel, to embrace such categories as Logos, or Pleroma to
explain the significance of Jesus.
3.1 Emerging metaphors and tricky terms
(Itinerario, cammino, accompagnamento, onesto cittadino, animazione, promozione, inte-
grale ...)
Let’s come back for a moment to Salesian translation, and while by no means ‘untrans-
latable’ there are emerging metaphors in Salesian language today, some of which are not
always easy to render adequately in English. Suffice it to mention one of them here. It is
more a metaphor cluster than anything else: itinerario, percorso, cammino, tappa, accom-
pagnamento. . . This is an emerging metaphor set because even a minimal corpus study
shows us that these terms are found in the Memorie Biografiche almost without exception
as physical or spatial references to a journey. But do the same thing with a contemporary
Salesian corpus (I took a random 1,000 files from sdb.org to test this) and the result is
as follows: itinerario di vita or di educazione alla fede, itinerario pedagogico, formativo, di
formazione ai giovani, di crescita, di discernimento, di santificazione, di evangelizzazione,
vocazionale, di preghiera, di liturgia, di vita sacramentale. The collocates for percorso are
very similar, as are those for cammino: il cammino dei giovani oggi, spirituale e pastorale,
di crescita e maturazione, di santificazione, di ascesi, di fidanzamento. And in the random
modern corpus there were practically no uses of the terms in their literal physical journey
sense, though there is no reason why there should not be; it would be perfectly legitimate.
This is not only a Salesian phenomenon, it is probably a religious or even more specif-
ically a ‘Catholic’ one. A quick search of the web will produce (I am still referring to the
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Italian language) itinerari, percorsi and cammini to do with catechetics and formation in
particular. Now the translator knows that you cannot get away with a single term in En-
glish for these: ‘journey’ can work in some instances, and for certain domains. A ‘journey
of faith’ is very acceptable in English, but we soon run into problems with some of the
ways itinerario is used. Would it be a ‘curriculum’? Not really, because that is a broader
concept, wider in content. An itinerario is a set of actions to achieve a goal, so we might
discover that the Youth Ministry Department, for example (in this case fictitious but it could
easily be true) istituisce un itinerario di base per l’educazione alla fede rivolto agli inseg-
nanti. To translate that as a religious education curriculum for teachers (or for the use
of religion teachers?) would not be quite correct. Maybe it is a basic outline, a set of
strategies they can follow for educating to the faith. And if we were to introduce the term
accompagnamento in here somewhere, would we translate it as ‘accompaniment’? Some
might but I would often not. It has its uses and can be appropriate but its overuse will
soon weigh an English text down. Un’accompagnamento vocazionale might just as well
be vocational guidance or we might personalise it as someone guiding someone in his
vocation (depending on context).
There are other little ‘tricks of the trade’ here with phrases that are very common in
Salesian literature: we will often find that we have a ricca visione d’insieme, where the
temptation is to translate this as a rich overview. Ricca/o is ‘rich’, but it is good to have
an armoury of other epithets up one’s sleeve, like ‘abundant’, for example. Similarly vi-
sione is ‘vision’, but a visione positiva might be just as easily (and better) translated as ‘a
positive view of’. And as for organico, well, in general terms it is best to avoid ‘organic’
for its sewerage connotations in English! It implies systematic, comprehensive, overall
arrangements of some kind.
A translator needs to be a bit more than bilingual; in many cases one needs to be
bicultural as well. This goes beyond the question of idiom translation, things like ‘pigs fly’
(Italian pigs don’t but their donkeys do)! There is a Salesian culture after all and it goes
beyond idioms or lexical differences; it is a way of thinking. We notice it every time a
translation is outsourced. Rare is the occasion when a non-Salesian (as in non-member
of the Salesian Family or at least ‘friend of Don Bosco’) can produce a perfectly acceptable
translation of a Salesian text.
But it can also happen amongst us, I mean amongst the English-speaking cohort of
the Salesian Family. We do not always agree on our common culture and could benefit
from a study which might result in agreement on some terminology or some translations
of common Salesian ‘idioms’. A case in point would be buon cristiano e onesto cittadino,
which we often see or hear in English as ‘Good Christian and honest citizen’, except that
the Italian onesto has a larger semantic field, larger than just ‘honest’; it really means
being morally upright, maybe a bit closer to the biblical ‘just man’ than the English ‘honest’
is. We could adopt ‘Good Christian and upright citizen’ and be done with it, just as today
nobody would translate parola all’orecchio with ‘whisper’, as it was translated back in the
1940s, but with ‘word in the ear’.
There is much talk these days about mission ad gentes. If the translator is someone
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3 Untying the knots
with a mission, as indicated earlier, could we think about translation ad gentes by which
I mean something in between translation ad verbum (literal) and translation ad sensum
(freer), and which takes account of what the gentes are saying? This would help both
those who produce our original texts and those who translate them. We have every right
to our own Salesian language, we but have a duty too to see that it does not become
overly special and precious. And how do we know what the gentes are saying? If we
want to get a snapshot of what the Salesian gentes are saying at any one moment, we
need a slice of representative Salesian language from across the world and some simple
lexical analysis of it. For example, every six years in preparation for a General Chapter,
Provincial Chapters send in their observations and comments to contribute to the Chapter
theme and other issues that touch closely on Salesian consecrated life and activity — we
could not get much more representative than that.
Some work along these lines was done on the basis of Provincial Chapter material from
six years ago in preparation for GC26. It already began to produce some results worth
thinking about. In English-language material that came in, for discussion on ‘vocation’,
common to just about every Provincial Chapter, the gentes showed a decided preference
for ‘vocation ministry’ over ‘vocation promotion’, while ‘vocation animation’ came in a poor
third. There is good reason for the third place in English, since ‘animation’ does not work
as well for us, though we have got used to it. We all know what animazione implies
in the broader and very rich history of the concept in the Salesian story, but this is not
good enough reason to go for formal equivalence, as happens too often, and translate
it unquestioningly as ‘animation’, which does not readily translate very much of the rich
history referred to. It doesn’t matter whether you have ‘vocation’, ‘mission’, ‘community’ or
any other noun in front of it. The problem remains.
Another term we might learn about from the gentes is promozione: in terms of verbs by
way of English translation we found: ‘foster’, ‘recruit’, ‘work for’, ‘follow up’, ‘encourage’,
‘nurture’, ‘accompany’, ‘attract’, ‘cater to’, ‘cherish’, ‘develop’, ‘discern’, ‘get’, ‘guide’, ‘in-
vite’, ‘propose’, ‘seek’ — and by the way, those are listed in order of frequency; ‘foster’
was way out front. When it came to nominal forms, ‘ministry’ was first, but we find ‘recruit-
ment’, ‘discernment of’, ‘care of’, ‘animation’, and as for the person who might hold this
responsibility in a Province, well, he was rarely called a ‘Vocation Minister’ but ‘Director’,
‘Promoter’, ‘Coordinator’, ‘Animator’ (again in order of frequency).
These might set you thinking. There were and still are other issues emerging: integrale
as ‘integral’. Does it work? Not for the gentes it seems. They preferred, and I believe
quite correctly, terms like ‘complete’, ‘all-rounded’, ‘holistic’. What happens if you have to
translate the term umanesimo integrale, because, given that ‘integral’ in English primarily
means ‘essential’ (in the sense that something is only complete if it has it), my feeling
is that ‘integral humanism’ might lead people to think in that direction, and what does
‘essential humanism’ mean? I don’t know! Tell me!
If we consider how the concept of wholeness is expressed in the Italian or Spanish use
of integrale/integral we soon come across the typical pane integrale that you get from the
Italian bakery (in Spanish, pan integral, Catalan, pa integral and German vollkornbrot). In
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English, ‘wholemeal bread’, though in the US they call it ‘wholewheat’. But there’s another
possibility too — extending the pane integrale idea we note that Italians say zucchero
integrale to mean ‘raw sugar’ (brown) and riso integrale to mean ‘brown rice’ so it seems to
have the notion of raw, unprocessed, crude to it. ‘Wholesome’ overcomes that, obviously,
but one wonders whether ‘basic’ mightn’t also work in reference to ‘humanism’ in the right
context.
One of our Salesian documents, the new YOUTH MINISTRY FRAMEWORK, makes abun-
dant use of integrale. Below are some possible translations of it in context.
promozione integrale = all-round development
formazione integrale = a rounded or complete formation (but could also be ’education’)
educazione integrale = comprehensive education
crescita integrale = holistic growth
crescita vera ed integrale = as above
progetto educativo integrale = an all-embracing educative project (or educational plan
or...)
sviluppo (umano) integrale = all-round or holistic development
maturazione (umana) integrale = growth to full maturity
umanesimo integrale = wholesome humanism
visione antropologica integrale = an integrated anthropological outlook
il loro bene integrale = for their complete good
liberazione integrale = overall liberation
pastorale integrale = comprehensive, total... ministry
(la pienezza di) ogni uomo e donna nella loro realtà integrale = ..... in their total reality /
taken as they are
(la sua) riflessione integrale (sull’uomo) = its full impact on the human being
significato integrale = complete meaning
crescita unitaria, integrale = in his or her homogenous, (or unified, or uniform...) and full
development
As I was writing the above, I received a letter from someone who is not a native speaker
of English, though a good one who can communicate his ideas clearly enough. But as
always, when a non-native speaker, especially one who speaks several languages, needs
to put things down in writing there are likely to be errors at a variety of levels, and if the
written text is intended for publication, then it would be important for these errors to be
corrected. Such was the case in this instance, and the confrere was asking for some
help by way of adjustments to his text. I decided not only to do that for him but to explain
why. This is another side of the Salesian translator’s task that perhaps does not befall the
other translators who do this sort of thing for a living. We are often involved in helping
those who do not speak our language ‘natively’. It is one of the glories of an international
Congregation spread as widely as the Salesians are. And it is also a joy for the translator
to get into the act preventively, saving extra work later!
So let the notes below, for that is all they are, be a kind of summary of at least some
of the issues involved in a contrastive linguistics approach. As I will say a little further on,
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if we happen to have a single text with a dozen or more of these features, then there is
little doubt that the reader (and sometimes too the listener) will have a sense of being in
a different habitat. I prefer that way of putting it to saying that it sounds ‘foreign’. The
notes should be self-explanatory and all of these issues will be picked up later in the text
if indeed they have not already been mentioned.
3.2 Notes on an L2 text
(Missionario, sessennio, geniale, proprio ... )
L2 is a shorthand way of saying a text by a second language speaker (even if it might
be his third, fourth of fifth language!)
missionary animation: I suggest missions animation. In Italian missionario is both
noun and adjective. In English ‘missionary’ is assumed to be a noun and is only sec-
ondarily an adjective. The Delegates are not only animating missionaries, I assume, but
everything to do with the missions. (And ‘missions’ rather than ‘mission’, which is too
all-embracing a term). Later on ‘missionary Aspirantates’ can remain since these are
intended for preparing missionaries.
Heartfelt greetings to all of you, who . . . I have removed the comma in the first line
before ‘who’. Italian nearly always puts a comma before a relative clause. English makes
a distinction between a defining and a non-defining relative clause. Defining ones do not
receive a comma. Defining relative clauses cannot be left out of the sentence if we wish
to know who or what is spoken of, so: ‘Heartfelt greetings to all of you’ (Who? or Which
of you? Those of you who are missions delegates) = ‘Heartfelt greetings to all of you who
are involved in missions animation. . . .’
Your own communities = your communities. The ‘own’ is not needed in English. Italian
might use proprio in this case but only as an intensifier.
I’m happy = I am happy. The formal version in case this talk goes out in print. We use
contractions in speech, but much less so in formal written language.
Since then there I was . . . = Since then I have been. . . . There is a question of aspect
involved here. English is different from Italian in this regard and the ‘have been’ suggests
continuity, other wise it would come across as meaning that someone only did it once or
twice! And later on you are emphasising the continuity factor, so it is important that it is
clear here.
in this sessennium = over these six years. The word ‘sessennium’ doesn’t exist in En-
glish, and the use of ‘over’ reinforces the continuity expressed above. ‘In’ would reinforce
the ‘once or twice’ of the simple past had you used it above.
Let’s try to remember = Let’s try to recall. There is a difference of meaning here. You
want to recall (bring back into memory, as distinct from just remembering)
the regular annual encounter tradition = the tradition of a regular annual meeting.
‘Encounter’ is not a good translation of ‘incontro’ when it means a meeting of more than
two people. You could replace ‘meeting’ with ‘gathering’ if you wanted to.
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Kolkatta = Kolkata
who received from the RM their crucifix = who received their crucifix from the RM.
This latter is the better word order in English.
out of Europe = beyond Europe
Perú = Peru. There are two rules for translating country names in English. Where there
is a standard, follow that — it is easy enough to find such standards (Atlases and the like).
Where there is no standard, leave it as you find it. In the case of country names in English
there is a standard and it omits diacritics and accents, so Peru, Bogota etc.
less known and practiced = less known and practised: the noun is with ‘c’ and the
verb is with ‘s’ (despite the American spell check in Microsoft!)
are discerned the specific theme = the specific theme.... are discerned. English is an
SVO language.
missionaries, who = missionaries who (cf. point about defining relative clauses and
commas).
A genial missionary: This may be a ‘false friend’. If you were thinking of the Italian
missionario geniale, then it is a false friend because ‘genial’ in English means ‘smiling,
easy to get on with, kindly. . . ’. He was that, but I think you mean he was intelligent, clever,
active, shrewd..... (and a whole range of other things, since you later say heroic as well
as intelligent) so I have swapped ‘brilliant’ ‘genial’, which includes all of them.
advices = advice. This word has no plural in English, at least not normally. It is always
in the singular but may imply more than one item.
guess, that = guess that in the context it is found here. In other words Italian frequently
puts a comma in front of a che but in English we only have certain situations where we do
that — rather few.
Fr. = Fr and the rule here is simple for abbreviations in English. If the abbreviation
involves the last letter in the word, no full stop. If it stops short of the last letter, full stop.
So, Sr Fr Mr Dr but Bro. etc. and so on.
15.000 = 15,000 English is the reverse of the continent where numbers are concerned.
path of GC27 = set of strategies in preparation for GC27. This is one of the real
conundrums in translation of itinerario, which is the word you have in mind (or perhaps
cammino, but it is the same thing in this case): There is no single word for itinerario in
English when used in this context. It means a set of strategies adopted to achieve a goal.
this kind of Salesians = ... Salesian.
young rich man = rich young man. Why? Can’t tell you! Native speaker intuition!
missionary point of view = point of view of the missions. Unless you mean ONLY
missionaries.
loose minister = lax minister (I hope Francis did not say ‘loose’ because it implies moral
looseness). Reminds one of the famous supposed advertisement for a certain brand of
Gin: ‘For making loose women tight’!
spread in more countries = ok for butter, but ‘spread across’ if you are speaking of
people.
Apart of = Apart from.
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In the year 1934 = In 1934. Italian usually says ’the year’ followed by the calendar year.
English usually does not preface the calendar year with ’the year’.
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habitat
(secolo XX, Unesco, Lc 21,25, «Lo scopo — diceva, », 1.234.567,89, voll., (...), — Vieni )
Figure 4.1: A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface
We are encouraged these days, in our more ecologically sensitive world, to be aware of
our habitat, and as one writer has put it,
‘A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work,
like a world of micro-organisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked
eye.’ (Noah Luke, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation W.W.
Norton and Co. 2007).
We could extend that idea beyond punctuation, for in many ways the sounds and symbols
of a language are a bit like micro-organisms too — they function together within the habitat
of a particular language in such a way that they do not strike the consciousness of the
native speaker, and should not. But they will look or sound ‘foreign’ to anyone else.
You do not need a word of Italian to consider, for a moment, the following items. Some-
thing else may stand out:
• secolo XX
• Unesco
• Marco mi ha detto: "Arriverò in ritardo alla cena".
• Chiese quindi licenza; e, abbracciato di nuovo il padron di casa, e tutti quelli che,
trovandosi più vicini a lui, poterono impadronirsene un momento; si liberò da essi
a fatica; ebbe a combatter nell’anticamera, per isbrigarsi da’ servitori, e anche da’
bravi, che gli baciavano il lembo dell’abito, il cordone, il cappuccio; e si trovò sulla
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strada, portato come in trionfo, e accompagnato da una folla di popolo, fino a una
porta della città; donde uscì, cominciando il suo pedestre viaggio verso il luogo del
suo noviziato.
• — Vieni, replicò l’altro, voglio che tu serva messa.
• i Salesiani di Freetown, Sierra Leone, hanno allestito presso i locali del centro “Don
Bosco Fambul” una mostra di abilità e talenti
• Il mondo digitale, tutto ciò che ha a che fare con l’informatica, le reti sociali e l’uso di
“gadget” tecnologici
• Ho cominciato gli esercizi spirituali nella casa della Missione il giorno 26 maggio
festa di S. Filippo Neri 1841 (...)
• Lc 21,25-28.34-36
• «Lo scopo di questa società — scrive intorno al 1859 in una delle prime stesure delle
Costituzioni salesiane — è di riunire insieme i suoi membri ecclesiastici, chierici e
anche laici, a fine di perfezionare se medesimi imitando le virtù del nostro Divin
Salvatore, specialmente nella carità verso i giovani poveri»
• 1.234.567,89
• pagg. 4–5
If any one of the above features appears in an English translation (with some exceptions),
‘native’ readers will have a niggling sense, perhaps not even a conscious one, that the
habitat is not quite theirs, or that something is amiss, or to put it in simple terms, that there
is not a good match between the source and target text. This complex thing called the
good match is what I mean by habitat. Let’s take each of the above, one by one.
secolo XX
Roman, not Arabic numerals are used in Italian but not usually in English, to indicate
volumes (as in books), or parts and chapters of books. They are also used to distinguish
popes, sovereigns and centuries. The English reader will not notice popes and sovereigns
so much, but will immediately detect something different about centuries, books and vol-
umes, and others kind of ‘chapters’ too, like General or Provincial Chapters.
Unesco
The rule in Italian seems to be that once an acronym goes over 5 letters, only the first is
capitalised. English capitalises each letter: UNESCO. Pick up an Italian newspaper, and
you will see that the language almost has a love affair with acronyms of all kinds, more
than we would be happy to see in a similar page in English, but of course that may be to
do with other factors, like the number of political parties or unions there are!
Marco mi ha detto: "Arriverò in ritardo alla cena"
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There are two features to note here. The first is the use of the colon(:) before direct
speech, where in British, and for that matter American English, we would expect a comma.
We would also expect the full stop/period to be inside the final quotation mark. In other
instances where the colon is used in Italian (much more frequently than it is in English, by
the way) it will normally be followed by a capitalised first term. British English will always
use a lower case first term; American usage would expect an upper case after a colon if
it is the beginning of what would be the equivalent of a new statement, but that would be
rare. Americans would prefer to start new statements after a full stop/period, and not after
a colon. A translator may well ‘translate’ the Italian colon in these instances with a phrase
such as ‘namely’, or ‘which includes’.
Chiese quindi licenza; e, abbracciato di nuovo il padron di casa . . .
Dear God, will this sentence never end? That is what the English reader is thinking!
Remember, ’a delicate world of punctuation lies just beneath the surface ...’ and the
semicolon is one to watch out for! The semicolon(;) here is being used to enumerate a
number of propositions. In English we would be less likely to do that, though it could be
done. We may re-arrange the entire paragraph and split it into separate sentences. I
believe there are two things going on in the cited example, however. One is the Italian
penchant for longer, largely uninterrupted flow of ideas, and the other is their fondness for
this item of punctuation. They invented it after all! It is pretty much an accepted view that
the Italian printer and publisher Aldo Manutius created the semicolon in or about 1494.
–– Vieni, replicò l’altro, voglio che tu serva messa
Again there are two items to note. One is the use of the em dash to indicate lines of
dialogue. This is overwhelmingly frequent in Don Bosco’s texts, for example. But the other
is that both dialogue and the reporting clause in the middle of the quotation are included in
what follows the dash, without distinction. The ‘dialogue dash’ is not entirely unknown in
English, and can be used to offer a certain style. James Joyce used it and indeed insisted
on it, but then James Joyce also did a lot of other very unusual things with the English
language!
i Salesiani di Freetown, Sierra Leone, hanno allestito presso i locali del centro
“Don Bosco Fambul” una mostra di abilità e talenti and “Il mondo digitale”, tutto
ciò che ha a che fare con l’informatica, le reti sociali e l’uso di “gadget” tecnologici
It is common in Italian, and certainly part of the regular ANS style, to put the names
of institutes in inverted commas, at least on the first mention, where in English we would
be satisfied with capitalisation alone. But it goes a bit further than this. Quotation marks
(usually the double ones) are also used to emphasise or pick out any unusual terms, so
jargon, dialect, technical and foreign words or phrases.
Ho cominciato gli esercizi spirituali nella casa della Missione il giorno 26 maggio
festa di S. Filippo Neri 1841 (. . . )
The ellipsis symbol is used in two ways in Italian. When it has brackets around it (. . . ) it
implies true ellipsis, meaning something of the original is being omitted. Without brackets
it may indicate a pause or even ‘etc.’ English prefers the em dash in this latter case and
will not put brackets around ellipsis; it leave the three points on their own.
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Lc 21,25-28.34-36
Apart from obviously different abbreviations for the books of Scripture, note that a
comma is used where English reference would employ a colon, and that a full stop/period
is used where we would employ a comma.
«Lo scopo di questa società — scrive intorno al 1859 in una delle prime stesure
delle Costituzioni salesiane — è di riunire insieme i suoi membri ecclesiastici, chierici
e anche laici, a fine di perfezionare se medesimi imitando le virtù del nostro Divin
Salvatore, specialmente nella carità verso i giovani poveri»
Other than the already noted reporting clause allowed within the quoted speech, we
immediately note the use of the chevrons. Italian today will use both inverted commas
and chevrons, depending on which style guide is in use, and occasionally it will follow the
French rule (but only with chevrons) which is that there must be a (non-breaking) space
associated with a punctuation glyph made up of two parts as « and » certainly are.
1.234.567,89
Italian uses a full stop/period for thousands and a comma for decimals, which is the
reverse of what we do in English.
pagg. 4–5
‘pag.’ would stand for ‘page’, but when the plural is needed the final consonant of an
abbreviation is doubled (hence vol. becomes voll. and so on). Something similar happens
when Italian wants to indicate more than one Salesian Cooperator (SC) which becomes
SS.CC., and other similar examples. One could also mention here, though it is much rarer,
that the hyphen (or the en dash) used to indicate the range 4–5 can occasionally appear
as 4÷5, in other words the division sign can sometimes be used to indicate a determined
range.
It would not be impossible that a single text in Italian (for example a homily by the Rector
Major, where he often adds in notes for later reference) might involve most or all of the
examples above. It is not difficult to imagine how the ‘habitat’ that would create for the
English reader would look so decidedly odd, if this were the case.
A good guide for all this in English is the European Union Style Guide for English, or
perhaps the Chicago Manual of Style, though the difference at one level (there are many
differences) is that the former is free and the latter is by subscription. There are many
other style guides around, but given the peculiar challenge that the European Union faces
with translation into 23 plus languages, their style guides are very much aware of the
confusion that can arise when translating between EU languages.
4.1 Notes on an L1 text
So far we have seen a set of notes on an L2 document, but let’s consider an L1 list of
items, or in other words, items from the pen of a native speaker of Italian. A number of the
same features apply in both cases. But when it comes to the ‘sounds and symbols’ of a
language, and we are dealing with a native speaker/writer, it is possible that we face even
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more demanding issues than those listed so far, since it is only fair to assume that the
native speaker or writer is not only competent, but possibly using many linguistic, stylistic
strategies of the language to convey a sense of register and tone; perhaps a particular
genre with its written or unwritten ‘rules’ is being applied, all in view of conveying the
message.
It is all too easy to assume that the Salesian translator is mainly translating information.
Such a view would be unfair to the authors of the material being translated. I would regard
myself as being reasonably competent in translating Italian into English and far less so
in translation from French, Spanish, Portuguese or German, but I usually ask, if I receive
something in Italian which has one of those other languages as its original, to see the
original, and will endeavour to the best of my ability to translate from the original, perhaps
with frequent reference to the Italian. Why? Because only that way can one notice whether
the ‘sounds and symbols’ are in fact integral to the text.
Consider the following verse from a Salesian poet:
Avventurosi romanzi
scritti dallo Spirito Santo
dove la sorpresa è norma.
Esistenze dal genere letterario il più vario
ma sempre affascinante:
dallo stile di un dramma al sapore di una fiaba
And one suggested translation:
Adventure stories
written by the Holy Spirit
in which surprise is the norm.
Expressions of the most varied literary forms
yet always fascinating:
from the style of a drama to the flavour of a fable.
The translation certainly picks up on much of the lexical and grammatical content, though
even here one could always raise questions: are avventurosi romanzi simply ‘adventure’
stories if the Holy Spirit is writing them, or something more? What are ‘always fascinating’
— the ‘expressions’ (could we say ‘instances’ here?) or is it the ‘literary genre’ per se,
since affascinante is in the singular? But we also need to ask if the literary genre of this
poem is being translated.
Is there a rhyming scheme in the Italian verse? It is very hard to avoid rhyme in Italian,
but taking this verse and other verses (not shown here) into account, it would appear that
there is no deliberate rhyming pattern. This could lead one to regarding the item as very
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4 Sounds and symbols of the translator’s habitat
free verse almost akin to prose and needing to be translated as such. But that might be
an error too, since end rhyming is no challenge at all in Italian; the challenge might well
be internal rhyme.
Robert Frost maintained that poetry is what is lost in translation, but could we put this in
quite the opposite way? Poetry is what is produced by translation, and what is produced
would be its rhythm, its sonority. We might need to look first at the rhythm and sonority of
the Italian, while recognising that English will do this differently. So the translator of poetry
has to be at least a good enough poet to create a sense of rhythm and sonority in English.
At any rate, in the case cited above, my feeling is that the challenge has been laid down
to the translator: find a way to make this look like poetry in English!
This poem is about holiness and begins with a heavenly metaphor — stars shining in
the firmament, fire of the Trinity, but immediately tied to the image of a volcano with its
‘hellish’ (one would think) fissures giving us a glimpse of the heavenly fire. It is a complex
image and a fine balance, because the contrast could easily go the wrong way.
The verse in question above switches to literature as the image — holiness written by
the Holy Spirit but in a range of literary forms. Avventurosi romanzi are but one. We have
stile di un dramma and sapore di una fiaba. The Italian poet’s choice of sonority here is the
assonance in avventurosi romanzi and the consonance of stile . . . sapore (and perhaps
affascinante . . . fiaba). The English poet’s choice has been consonance in ‘flavour of
a fable’. Could the sonority of the English have been further reinforced in other ways?
Instead of ‘flavour’, maybe ‘spice’, so in other words stay with the Italian poet’s pattern.
Returning to avventurosi romanzi for a moment, could this be ‘Daring prose’ (to contrast
with drama and fable later)? It may add some zest to the image. And then one has the
possibility of something like ‘penned by the Holy Spirit’. That way we begin to set up a set
of sounds and rhythms that are peculiarly English.
The Salesian translator may be faced with a very wide range of genres and demanding
tasks that require time and reflection and these may also have to do with the sounds and
symbols of the language, even before we begin to consider the other levels of language.
Certainly we can expect that in poetry.
4.2 Fascination with lists
There is one more clue in the complete poem in Italian which I believe is quite instructive.
The poem includes a considerable list of images: stars, telescopes, volcanoes, novels,
dramas, fables, cosmonauts, giants, orbits, artists, messages, cultures, races, psycholo-
gists, masters . . . I am reminded of how Umberto Eco finishes a book which he entitles
‘Confessions of a Young Novelist’ by saying,
Lists: a pleasure to read and to write. These are the confessions of a young
writer.
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Eco believes that lists are significant, claims that his interest in them came from the
mantra-like recitation of Litanies he learned as a child in Catholic education, then goes
on to explore famous lists, literary and otherwise, throughout history. He is suggesting,
of course, that any text with a list or that is a list is worth double-checking for what that
list might be telling us. He does not mention Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982)
in this discussion but it is interesting that when it was published in the US (Keneally is an
Australian) it became Schindler’s List and the subsequent film also carried that title. It is
the list of people he saved from the Holocaust. In fact there were two lists. The ‘real’ Os-
car Schindler’s list of people he wished to save was found in a suitcase left to a German
couple. A second list that appears in Spielberg’s 1993 film version was drawn up towards
the end of the war. Schindler added fictitious jobs to each name to convince the SS that
these workers were vital to the war effort.
What Eco does not say, but it came to mind as I was reading him on this subject,
was that it might also explain something about Italian rhetorical style, where enumeration
is king. The simplest example is the three adjectives, three descriptions approach to
many subjects, and the more ineffable the subject the greater number of adjectives, or
so it seems to me! As I write this I am attempting to translate a university level text on
educational philosophy written by an Italian professor whose is noted for his language
competence as well as, of course, his competence in his field. He is also a poet! Put all
those competencies together and, I am afraid, the translator has to be able to handle lists,
cascading catalogues of concepts that might leave Roget gasping. Here is an example
where education appears to be an obviously and extraordinarily ineffable subject!
Ciò avviene nell’interazione con l’ambiente e con le sue concrete possibilità
(= risorse) storico-ambientale-culturali, materiali e spirituali; e con la medi-
azione e il sostegno, di figure (genitori, educatori, maestri, insegnanti, istitu-
tori, animatori, assistenti, ecc.), istituzioni (famiglia, scuola, chiese, gruppi,
associazioni, mass-media, organizzazione sociale dello sport e del tempo
libero, ecc.), attività individuali e sociali più o meno appositamente intrap-
rese a questo scopo (allevamento, prevenzione, cura, assistenza, addestra-
mento, socializzazione, inculturazione, insegnamento, istruzione, educazione,
animazione, catechesi, ecc.)
Elsewhere Eco has some other interesting things to say about texts in general, such as,
‘I believe that every Proper Noun is a peg on which we hang a set of properties’, and,
‘. . . a text [which] is a machine conceived in order to elicit interpretations’, and again,
‘a text is a lazy machine that wants its readers to do part of its job’ (Umberto Eco, Con-
fessions of a Young Novelist, Harvard University Press, 2011). This would suggest that
any text for translation be it poem or even pragmatic list of data as one might find in a
news item, is inviting some degree of interpretation. This idea is not restricted to the
reader or, rather, we assume that the translator is a ‘reader plus’. This does not give the
translator/interpreter/reader open slather to translate as he or she wishes but it does of-
fer freedom constrained by at least one important criterion: we check our interpretation
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against the text as a coherent whole. In other words the internal textual coherence, which
is under the control of the text’s author, controls the translator’s possible wild fantasies!
Do you have the feeling that this understanding of things lifts even the most mundane
of texts to another level of task? Despite his reference to ‘machine’, I do not believe Eco
is suggesting mechanical translation, nor wild abandon to whims of interpretation — quite
the opposite. It means giving priority to intentionality over informational content. It means
asking questions of the text such as ‘What genre are you?’, ‘What culture do you come
from?’, ‘Are you formal or informal?’, ‘How many ways are you employing to mean what
you mean?’, ‘What register, sociolect or dialect are you using?’, and perhaps many others.
And there, you see, I have dropped into lists myself!
And just back to that poem once more, since it says something that is directly connected
with the title of this work:
Miracoli viventi
davanti ai quali non si ha bisogno di esperti
per accettare la straordinarietà del Vangelo vissuto sine glossa
Translated as (not by myself)
Living miracles
before whom no experts are needed
to acknowledge the extraordinary quality of the Gospel lived sine glossa
That sine glossa (almost certainly a famous reference to St Francis of Assisi and Fran-
ciscan spirituality) might also be a cautionary tale for translators in the light of the freer
interpretations I appear to be encouraging. It takes the opposite view to ‘Gloseing’s a
glorious thing’!
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Figure 5.1: This end up!
So you think notizie means news, and on a simple word-for-word basis, you may be cor-
rect. We have already established in these pages that word-for-word, literal translation,
call it what you will, does not get the translator very far. Let’s say you have received a del-
icate package from Italy (and I mean ’really delicate’, about 9 years old worth!) Chances
are the box will have NON CAPOVOLGERE! written on it. Now you could translate that with
‘Do not turn over’, but it just doesn’t cut it, does it. Your sense of things says it probably
means: THIS END UP! And that is how it should be translated. NON CORICARE is less of
a problem, though one might have expected a more complete phrase like NON CORICARE
ASSOLUTAMENTE DI LATO. ’On no account lie in its side’.
The individual who sent you the box would like to know how things are going (Did the
’package’ — or the boy in this case! — arrive in one piece?) and may email you with
Fammi avere tue notizie. . . . ‘Let me have your news’? Hmm, it doesn’t quite make it. We
do not mind using ‘news’ in something like ‘Gimme the news on. . . ’ or similar, but ‘your
news’ is a little bit odd. The native speaker might be more likely to say, ‘Hope to hear from
you (about the parcel I sent you)’.
Let’s try notizie in another context: I giovani d’oggi non fanno più notizia. ‘The youth of
today do not make news any more’? That sounds like a very good translation, except that
it’s not, because the sense of fare notizia was not translated at all. ‘Youth today do not
shock us any more’ might be closer to the intended meaning.
So here we are at a level up from sounds and symbols. We are now tackling words,
words in phrases, words in complete statements (like a sentence). This brings a whole
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new set of challenges which I would like to deal with primarily by taking one genre a
Salesian translator will almost inevitably need to deal with: NEWS.
As must be already evident from the above, we need to keep a close eye on words (or
lexical items, which is a slightly broader and more accurate term). The semantic range of
lexical items between languages is often not quite the same. Try nipote, for example: it can
mean ‘nephew’, ‘niece’, ‘grandchild’, ‘grandson’, ‘granddaughter’, in English. A reverse
situation occurs for the English idea of a ‘joke’, which can cover a range of situations
for us. Italian has more specific terms: barzaletta is probably ‘joke’ in general terms,
but a battuta is a witty comment. Or another thing to keep an eye on is the way we
can refer to ‘the priest’ in Italian. Sacerdote is probably the most respectful. Prete can,
in certain contexts, be quite scornful. Because of the possibilities of certain additional
morphemes in Italian, we could say, for example, pretaglia in reference to the group, but
that would translate along the lines of ‘the dog-collar mob’! Don Bosco referred often to
the stato ecclesiastico when he was interested in vocations to the priesthood. It is best
not translated as ‘ecclesiastical state’, which is being pedantic in English. Better, ‘clergy’.
5.1 ANS, lexical bundles, phrase patterns
(notizia, buonanotte, notte bianca, urna ...)
Let’s assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that we are talking about translating
ANS, the Salesian Info Agency. And by the way, this in itself introduces an interesting
quirk involving the word notizie. Does ANS mean ‘news’? Yes and no! The acronym goes
back to 1956 when the Agenzia Missionaria Salesiana changed its name and adopted
an acronym for it: Agenzia Notize Salesiane = ANS. By 1997, when the input and output
of ANS had broadened considerably, the acronym remained, but by now expanded into
Agenzia Internazionale Salesiana d’Informazione, quite a handful really. So no surprise
that ten years later this was altered to read: Agenzia Info Salesiana, though the acronym
remains ANS, the argument being that we take the ‘N’ in ‘iNfo’. What was earlier a bit of a
handful, now becomes a bit of stretch.
What is happening here is that ANS has effectively become a Salesian word in itself,
and the expansion is less an expansion than it is a definition of that word. The same thing
has happened with IUS, which originally expanded into Istituti Universitarii Salesiani but
now means, in translation, ‘Salesian Institutes of Higher Education’, except that we stay
with IUS and do not write IESS, though that could sound quite nice!
Having established that ANS means ‘information’, some of that information is, of course,
good old fashioned NEWS. Well, sort of. It might be interesting to explore ANS news for a
moment to see what particular challenges it provides for the IT > EN translator.
Gone are the days when all ANS news was conceived and born in Italian, then adopted
into other languages. What happens today is more of an in vitro process. The news item’s
father may be one of half a dozen languages, but after a few hours of assisted technology
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and personal intervention, which will involve translation into Italian, then being sent out for
further translation into other languages, it gives birth to sextuplets. So the original may
be Spanish or English, let’s say, from which it is competently selected, edited (if needs
be) and then translated into Italian. The Italian version then becomes the ‘original’ for all
but the original language. Other languages which it will be translated into include English,
French, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish. And this happens every day between breakfast and
lunch! Every effort is made to avoid back translation, from Italian into the original, though
such might occasionally happen inadvertently. If it does happen, you may be sure that it
will be to the detriment of the original original!
With that background, then, let’s limit ourselves to the language pair we are most inter-
ested in, and consider what the challenges are. With some relatively simple lexical and
text analysis we can come up with some helpful insights.
ZENIT is another Catholic, Rome-based news agency with a much more recent history
(1997) and though once under the Legionaries of Christ, it has tried to adopt a more
universal approach, and an arguably successful one. Our interest here is not to make
comparisons except at one level — what it means for the translator in either case. The
following excerpts (title and lead) from a very similar news item from both agencies will
help make the point.
ZENIT
La buonanotte di Don Bosco
Notte bianca a Catania accanto alle reliquie del santo
La notte della solennità di tutti i Santi, una folla immensa ha atteso nel cor-
tile dell’Istituto “San Francesco di Sales” l’arrivo della reliquia di San Giovanni
Bosco: una teca contenente il corpo del Santo custodito e venerato a Torino
come la reliquia del braccio del Padre di giovani, quasi un simbolico scambio
di amicizia e di accoglienza verso la gioventù.
ANS
Italia - Don Bosco in Sicilia: l’incontro con la beata Maddalena Morano e la
festa col Rettor Maggiore
Si è aperta venerdì scorso, 1 ° novembre, la peregrinazione della reliquia di
Don Bosco nell’Ispettoria sicula. Attesa con impazienza da migliaia di apparte-
nenti alla Famiglia Salesiana, la reliquia di Don Bosco ha già animato alcuni
festosi eventi ad Alì Terme, Taormina e Catania; qui sono intervenuti anche il
Rettor Maggiore, Don Pascual Chávez, e il suo Vicario, don Adriano Bregolin.
ZENIT did not translate this item into English, so I offer my own translation below:
Don Bosco’s ‘Good Night’
LATE AND LIVELY ALL SAINTS NIGHT IN CATANIA AROUND DON BOSCO’S
RELIC
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An immense crowd waited in the courtyard of the St Francis de Sales Insti-
tute on All Saints night for the arrival of St John Bosco’s reliquary containing
the body of the Saint, kept and venerated in Turin. The reliquary contains a
relic of the arm belonging to the Saint of the young, almost a symbolic ex-
change of friendship, and acceptance of young people.
ANS
Italy — Don Bosco in Sicily: with Blessed Maddalena Morano and the Rector
Major
(ANS — Catania) — Friday 1st November saw the beginning of the pilgrim-
age of the Don Bosco relic in Sicily. Thousands of the Salesian Family had
awaited this moment, and Don Bosco’s relic has already been part of festiv-
ities at Alì Terme, Taormina and Catania; at this latter, the Rector Major, Fr
Pascual Chávez, and his Vicar, Fr Adriano Bregolin took part.
Just a handful of sentences really, but full of challenges at every level! I will come to the
considerable difference between the ZENIT and the ANS texts, and will be suggesting
that the level of difficulty that represents is really the main challenge, but first it would be
a good idea to deal with the words and phrases. I limit myself to the ZENIT translation for
this part.
The author of the ZENIT text is not a Salesian, we know that much (a name is given
which I have not included here) but is obviously well enough aware of a good deal of
Salesian tradition and feels comfortable with buonanotte. This is explained later in the
news item (not included here) by describing what the Provincial did towards the end of the
evening, just in case a reader did not understand the significance of the term. In English
I have chosen to put it in scare quotes to indicate that it is something a little out of the
ordinary for some readers at least, though had we translated the whole text, they would
have been clear what it meant by the end.
Notte bianca is more of a challenge, since this does not have a simple equivalent in
English. It could be a ‘sleepless night’, but that has connotations of people counting
sheep, and this was not the author’s intention here, clearly. The night he is talking about
is a ‘good’ one. A notte bianca is a big city fun event where people do not sleep because
there are so many attractions around to keep them up and awake. It belongs to the habitat
of the young! It is an appropriate term in this case, for the reason just given but also the
play on words between title and subtitle, and the fact that this is the Saint of the young
we are talking about. I chose to translate it as ‘late and lively night’, though to be honest
I almost went for ‘all night’, which would have gone nicely with ‘All Saints’! But the article
does not warrant ‘all night’, just a very late one.
The ZENIT writer refers to a solennità, which is liturgically correct but also very typical of
‘the world seen from Rome’. ‘The solemnity of xxx’ (replace x with any liturgical solemnity
you like) would be a typical lexical bundle in Catholic Italian language, and there would
be no hint of discordance between this use of solennità and a notte bianca. All Saints is
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5 When notizie are not the news
a liturgical solemnity universally I would think, in the Catholic world, but it is not a public
holiday in most places and would not have the cultural pull that it has in Italy. So I left out
reference to it altogether as a complicating element.
Then comes the reference to the teca. At this point we may be certain, if we had any
doubts, that the writer is not a Salesian since the term urna would have been employed.
Either way it is a translation challenge. Urna’s normal semantic range has been extended
slightly by Salesians to cover the object(s) in question, but one could not say that it is an
easily understood connotation for Italians, which is why ZENIT avoided it, one suspects.
‘Urn’ would be even more unsatisfactory in English, especially for cricket-loving countries,
and if it is not that urn people are thinking of, then it will be a Greek rather than an Italian
one! So what are we left with? Not too many possibilities, partly because the ‘Anglo’ world
is not steeped in travelling relics, so maybe the more generic ‘reliquary’ is the way to go.
There is not a single term that I can think of which precisely explains a glass, body-sized
container for what is never the Saint’s body but a plaster or wax cast dressed in vestments,
in which a small relic is implanted. And what I have just done there is almost what the
Italian writer did anyway!
With that out of the way, we can turn our attention now to the difference between the
two news items, where the greater translation challenge lies I feel. These two items are
quite representative. One might consider them templates.
A textual analysis of an entire month’s news from ANS is helpful. They are Italian ‘orig-
inals’, meaning they may have been the true original or translated to become such for
further adoption into other languages. Four items a day, five days a week, so approxi-
mately 80 news items, a total of nearly 27,000 word tokens (includes words that may be
repeated) or a little over 5,000 word types with all repetitions eliminated. This is a sub-
stantial enough corpus to work with. We can be interested in two features overall. What
lexical bundles will we find, and what other features of interest might begin to stand out?
Lexical bundles are not quite the same thing as idioms, easily recognisable fixed clusters
of word with some special meaning. Idioms will be rarer. Lexical bundles (we can assume
3 or 4 word bundles) will be a cluster of words that always go together, though they may
have no special meaning.
The ANS corpus produces a quite extensive list of bundles. Herewith a list of a few of
them in order of frequency:
ha avuto luogo (hanno luogo, avrà luogo), si è svolto, in occasione di (del, dell’, della),
nel corso di, in collaborazione con, si tratta di, in primo luogo, in un momento di. There
are many more, but one can immediately see that these are all integral to narration of an
event, things like ‘took place at’, ‘on the occasion of’, ‘during’, and so on. This is cronaca
in the sense that the Italian language understands it to be. A ZENIT corpus does not
largely feature these bundles. A different style is employed.
Consider now the regular phrase pattern for both ANS and ZENIT. Note the ANS pat-
tern. Put in simple terms, we are more likely to find the main element of an Italian sentence
to the right than to the left. The left will often contain adverbial clauses of time, clauses
indicating location and so on. In the news item we are considering, it begins with the verb
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si è aperta, further qualified by venerdì scorso, and only later do we come to the real sub-
ject of it all — the reliquary and the Sicilian province. This is a very regular pattern in ANS
news, but also for photo captions, answering the 5 ‘W’s but in a particular order: when,
where, how, who, what. This becomes a translation challenge for a number of reasons.
While both languages are SVO (subject-verb-object) languages, the fact that Italian is an
inflected language gives it more freedom to change word order. English, with some stylis-
tic exceptions, requires SVO to be quite visible. It means we generally need to reverse the
order we find in an ANS sentence. Instead, to get some variety and ‘spice’ into narration,
English uses a range of other more subtle features, such as verbal aspect (we have many
ways of using past tense to link to or be separate from, the present, which Italian does not
have), or discourse features, or our lexical choices and so on.
The problem is a pragmatic one. Faced with four articles to translate in the space of
an hour or two, the temptation is to translate roughly as you find things, with obvious
adjustments. But the kinds of adjustments needed to give a bit more life to the narration in
English are not obvious ones and need more time and thought. It often does not happen
and the end result is a certain ‘woodenness’ about the translation, and that is assuming we
have not missed tricky items like notte bianca or even more subtle ones like fare notizia.
Italian style suggests that we do not simply repeat the subject word for word each time,
but vary our way of doing so. ‘Don Bosco’ will be mentioned first up, but subsequently
becomes ‘the Saint of the young’, ‘the priest from Valdocco’, and so on — all in the space
of a paragraph. Salesians can be Salesians to begin with, but soon become ‘Don Bosco’s
sons’, ‘the religious’. The Prime Minister of Italy, currently Enrico Letta as this is being
written, may be referred to as the Presidente del Consiglio. It would be a mistake to always
translate this as ‘President of the Council’. The Italian journalist might simply mean he is
Prime Minister. English will be happy if Milan is referenced several times in a paragraph
or article, but not Italian. It will be subsequently referred to as ‘the capital of Lombardy,
‘Italy’s fashion capital, ‘the business capital’. Remember Umberto Eco’s comment about
‘every Proper Noun is a peg on which to hang a set of properties’? Reading some news
items in Italian, including ANS ones, is like facing up to a trivia quiz (well, this is what it
looks like to me; I am sure an Italian journalist would not agree!) The point is that if we
translate as we find it, the English begins to sound over-inflated and decidedly odd.
This can happen in other ways too. Italian writing is ‘catholic’ to the core, by which I
mean in that all-embracing style which is Catholic. Why have one Saint when you can
have two? Why say there were 300 people who attended when you can say ‘more than
300’? Why have just a relic when you can have an insigne relic (an outstanding, important
one)? Why use cold stone when there’s a gold mosaic around somewhere? Why just
a Salesian bishop when you can have him as a prelate as well? Italian packs in the
flourishes and the words and the information. If we take our English shears to such a text,
the poor little lamb may be left shivering.
To which we can add that Italian is based on Latin and is the Romance language maybe
closest to Latin. English is a hybrid with dual Latin and Germanic roots. Latin was the
language of the clergy and the educated and gave us the ‘fancy’ words. German gave us
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the rougher, common versions. French influence followed the Latin but gave the English
the chance to sound mysterious! So, if you have your doubts about using ‘reliquary’ to
describe the container for the relic, you could take easy refuge in a ‘reliquaire’. It may be
just the term you were looking for!
If we think we are having difficulties with relics and urns and the like, imagine what it
was like in the other direction for the translators of Harry Potter. ‘Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows’? That came out as Harry Potter e i doni della morte in the Italian title,
and became ‘the relics of death’ in Swedish. What a pity that ‘deathly hallows’ meant only
three items: the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Invisibility Cloak, and did
not include a teca/ or urna. That would have given us a useful term!
5.2 False friends
(Infatti, attualmente, simpatico, conferenza, morbido, sensibile, assistere, possibilmente,
edito, ambiente, editore ...)
There can be many kinds of friends in Italian: you can have amici del cuore (close
friends), amici fraterni (fraternal friends), amici per la pelle (best friends), but watch out
for falsi amici (false friends).
Since Italian is more Latinate than English, and bearing in mind the question of ‘reg-
ister’ (Latin = educated, French = upper-class and exotic, German = down-to-earth), the
translator has to be very much on guard: ‘veracity’ v. ‘truth’, ‘lateral’ v. ‘side’, ‘verdant’ v.
‘green’ etc. It goes well beyond a question of register however. There are so many ‘false
friends’, using this as a generic term here to cover false cognates and some phrases as
well, that can waylay us when translating from Italian to English. The following lists are
all traps along the pattern of the first in the list: infatti translated as ‘in fact’ where it may
mean ‘indeed’.
infatti = ‘in fact’ when it really means ‘indeed’
attualmente used to mean ‘actually, . . . ’ when it means ‘currently’
simpatico = ‘sympathetic’ where it really mean ‘pleasant, friendly’
secondo me = ‘according to me’, but would be better as ‘in my opinion’
conoscere = ‘to know’ when in the context of ‘to meet (for the first time)’
libreria = ‘library’, but is really a bookshop
lettura = ‘lecture’ when it means ‘reading’
conferenza = ‘conference’ when it is really used to mean ‘lecture’
morbido = ‘morbid’ when it means ‘soft’
sensible = ‘sensible’ when it really means ‘sensitive’
eventuale, eventualmente = ‘eventual’ or ‘eventually’ when it means ‘possible’ or ‘likely’
assistere = ‘assist’ when it means ‘attend’ or even ‘be witness to’
controllo = ‘control’ when it means ‘check’
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False friends cover a range of grammatical forms — the list above already contains
more than only nouns. Here are few more to consider:
Adverbs
Italian
equamente
eventualmente
fatalmente
occasionalmente
possibilmente
presentemente
scarsamente
specialmente
ultimamente
False friend
equally
eventually
fatally
occasionally
possibly
presently
scarcely
specially
ultimately
notizia, buonanotte, notte bianca, urna Correct meaning
justly, fairly
if necessary, in case, possibly
unfortunately
by chance, fortuitously
if possible
at present, at the moment
scantily, poorly, meagrely
particularly
recently, lately, in recent times
Adjectives
Italian
bravo
baldo
caldo
edito
esaltato
individioso
morbido
moroso
rilevante
sensibile
servizievole
simpatico
tremendo
triviale
volentoroso
False friend
brave
bald
cold
edited
exalted
invidious
morbid
morose
relevant
sensible
serviceable
sympathetic
tremendous
trivial
voluntary
Correct meaning
skilful, honest, well-behaved
bold, courageous
warm, hot
published
excited, hot-headed
envious
soft, delicate, loose, mellow
in arrears
large, considerable, important
sensitive, susceptible
helpful, amiable, obliging
nice, pleasant, likeable
terrible, awful, dreadful
vulgar, obscene, lewd
willing, eager, keen
And here is a more ‘Salesian’ list:
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Italian
ambiente
ambiente educativo
carta
coerenza
collaboratore
collegio
colloquio
colonia
compagno
condizione
docile
economo
editore
emarginati
esercizi spirituali
fisionomia
formazione
fragilità
geniale
giaculatoria
globale
incaricato
integrale
interessare
irrinunciabile
itinerario
lettorato
liminalità
linguaggio
missionario
Monsignore
operativo
orfano
organico
organismi
passività
pastorale
paternità
patrimonio
pedagogia
pietà
False friend
environment
educational environment
card
coherence
collaborator
college
colloquium
colony
companion
condition
docile
economer
editor
emarginated
spiritual exercises
physiognomy
formation
fragility
genial
ejaculation
global
incharge, in-charge
integral
to interest, be interested
unrencounceable
itinerary
lectorate
liminality
language
missionary
Monsignor
operative
orphan
organic
organisms
passivity
pastoral
paternity
patrimony
pedagogy
piety
Possible equivalent(s)
setting
climate, spirit
charter
consistency
helper, co-worker, partner
boarding school
friendly talk, chat
camp (e.g. summer camp)
friend
situation, circumstance
well-behaved, obedient
bursar, administrator, treasurer
publisher
marginalised, on the fringes
retreat
special character, shape
education, training
frailty
clever, gifted, smart
invocation, aspiration
overall
person in charge
all-round, holistic
get involved, be concerned with
inalienable, essential
set of strategies
ministry of Reader
frontier situation
expression, vocabulary
mission (adj)
Bishop, Archbishop
practical, working
lost a father, mother
systematic, complete
groups, bodies, entities
also ‘liabilities’ in accounting
ministry
fatherliness
heritage, legacy
education
devotion
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presbiterio
presidenza
preventività
procura
professionale
profetico
progetto
promozione
protocollo
radiografia
regolamento
Responsabile maggiore
ricoverato
rilanciare
rettorato
santuario
scusa
sessennio
sinergia
territorio
vicario
volontariato
presbytery
presidency
preventivity
procure (n)
professional
prophetic
project
promotion
protocol
radiography, X-Ray
regulation
Responsible major
recovered
relaunch
rectorate
sanctuary
excuse
sessennium
synergy
territory
vicar
voluntariate
sanctuary, presbyterium
executive committee
prevention
Mission and Development Office
technical (school)
inspired
plan
fostering, development
file number, correspondence register
overview
Regulations
Moderator General
given shelter, taken to hospital
reinvigorate
term of office of Rector Major
shrine
apology
six year period
team work
neighbourhood
vice rector, vice provincial
volunteer (movement, group)
Other common areas of confusion, resulting from different or overlapping coverage in
the two languages include:
still, yet, again, as, how, like (all rendered in Italian by come)
which, what, who, that (all rendered in Italian by che)
too, too much, too many (all rendered in Italian by troppo)
very, a lot, many, much (all rendered in Italian by molto)
why, because (both rendered in Italian by perché)
come, go
bring, take
dead, died (both rendered in Italian by morto)
also, even (both rendered in Italian by anche)
worse, worst
Words may be borrowed from French, e.g.:
stage for ‘course’, ‘work experience’
depliant for ‘brochure’
équipe for ‘team’
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And English loan-words may be re-exported with changed meanings, as in the use of
gadget to mean ‘freebie’, ‘promotional item’. We need to be alert to this, since Italian
happily accepts words from other languages, but may choose a gerund form and treat it
as a noun, or may change its meaning entirely. Here are just a few of this kind:
autogrill = service station (where you can get something to eat)
autostop = hitch-hiking (this turned up several times in a recent screenplay on the Sale-
sian mission in Patagonia, e.g.: mi è finita la benzina, da dove ti ho chiamato per telefono
e sono venuto a piedi fin qui, in auto-stop)
box lock-up = garage
camping = campsite
dancing = dance-hall
eskimo = parka
flipper = pin-ball machine
footing = jogging
golf jumper = jersey
notes = notebook
parking = car-park, parking garage
plaid = travelling rug
slip = underpants/knickers (so, applicable to both male and female)
smoking = dinner jacket/tuxedo
spider (car) = convertible
spot = a commercial
stage = training course
starter (of car) = choke
tight = morning suit
toast = toasted sandwich
slow = uno ‘slow’ is the sort of dance where you just shuffle your feet.
tilt = no longer working properly! Just as pin-ball machines go dead and display TILT
when shaken, the expression andare in tilt has become an Italian cliché.
And while we are on a roll, just to finish off this extensive list of likely traps for the unwary,
here are a few that could turn up in common speech (not so often, maybe, in writing):
ponte, which is not a bridge in certain contexts but what Australians would call a long
weekend. The difference being that in Italy you have a ponte when there is a national
holiday on a Tuesday or a Thursday, and that is linked to the weekend to have a really
long weekend.
confetti, not things you throw at newly-weds, because if you do they might get hurt!
Instead they are those little lollies wrapped up in lace or similar, that the newly-weds give
you.
casino, a word to be a bit careful with. It means ‘brothel’! I have never quite worked out
if saying Che casino! (What a mess!) is rude or not. Maybe it is best to avoid it. If you
really want to go gambling, then put an accent on the final ‘o’.
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fiasco, a type of wine bottle (though the other meaning exists, figuratively and slightly
different to the English).
maestro, in common parlance a primary teacher.
vendetta, nowhere near as strong as in English. It simply means ‘revenge’. If you want
a vendetta in Italian you will need a faida.
sciupata, anything from having the blahs, to looking pale, to not feeling that good.
5.3 Terminology and translation
The Salesian translator will not normally have much of a problem with the English loan
words listed earlier, unless it is a case of interpreting discussions or topics that involve
young people using the kind of jargon they often use (and the above list will not get the
interpreter very far!). But there is another kind of jargon that can cause the Salesian
translator problems, and this is our own jargon!
Some of the earlier lists were to help in a situation where a target-text element must be
sought to correspond in some way to a source-text element and more than one solution is
viable (solutions may even include omission or transcription). If only one solution is viable,
then we are probably dealing with terminology.
Fortunately the English language translator of Salesian texts has a terminological aid
that most other languages do not have. It is known as Salesian termbase and can be ac-
cessed from the home page of the Salesian central website www.sdb.org. This termbase
explains itself as follows:
Salesian Termbase is an aid to consistent terminology in the domain we
know as ‘Salesian’, particularly its ‘sdb’ subdomain. Translators will also find it
helpful, not only because it offers a straightforward target and source language
glossary, but also because the more complete term view will provide fuller
information about the concept represented by the term.
Salesian Termbase was designed to:
1. Provide a formal approach to Salesian terminology worldwide.
2. Facilitate entry of term data.
3. Assist those who need to work with Salesian terminology, e.g. translators,
formators, those who write official documents...
It is always difficult to know precisely when a term belongs to the particu-
lar discourse called ‘Salesian’ and when it belongs to an expanding discourse
that occasionally overlaps with it - and may in the future overlap still further.
The whole area of digital terminology (e.g. terms associated with social net-
working) is only partially represented currently in general Salesian texts, but
clearly this will grow, and certainly in areas of close contact with young people,
the Salesian Family will already be familiar with these terms, many of them
relatively new even in general discourse and relatively rare therefore in all but
recent texts. There will be other similar areas.
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Termbase contains several different tools which may assist the translator:
• a database of Salesian terms where each term is given a definition (formal or au-
thoritative, based on a document, usually), some basic linguistic information (part
of speech or POS), the type and status of the term (e.g. whether it is shared more
widely or very localised and whether it is still in use or deprecated), equivalents in
other languages, synonyms, a description, use in context, and anything else that
might help one understand the term.
• an IT-EN glossary or basic dictionary. While this may make use of material from the
termbase it is not the same thing. It is more likely to contain additional information
concerning the Italian and English meanings and the use of the term. It says it is
IT-EN, but in fact it may contain Latin or Spanish terms if these are in general use in
Salesian documentation.
• a list of false friends (substantially already included in the earlier list printed here)
• a set of semantic vocabularies. These have been put together to assist webmasters
who wish to include linked data possibilities or other semantic markup in HTML, but
they can also be a useful resource for a translator.
Let’s take an example of how a translator might use all of these items to help - the example
below is a seemingly obvious one for the Salesian translator but would not be so for
anyone who is new to this kind of discourse. After we have been through the process
below, it might also be the case that the Salesian translator is a little wiser than he or she
was beforehand!
Dicastero
The translator comes across this term in a Salesian document. Some general dictionar-
ies would indicate ‘dicastery’, as found in Vatican English documents, as the correct gloss
for this term. So let’s use the resources indicated above to help us see how we should
translate it.
1. THE IT-EN SALESIAN DICTIONARY tells us: dicastero = Department. There is a
distinction between a dicastero and a settore (sector), the latter being the wider term,
currently, in Salesian jargon. Other matters below a department would be called areas.
We do not use the Vatican English gloss, ‘dicastery’.
2. TERMBASE: department. We learn that it is ‘An organisational arrangement under
a sector’. It is a noun, a general and ordinary term (found outside Salesian discourse)
and three language equivalents are recorded: Italian, Spanish and French. No synonyms
are indicated, nor any special regional usage. But the description gives us additional
information to that so far found in the dictionary. We are clearer about the distinction
between sector and department, and we learn that the Economy and Salesian Family are
organised a little differently to the other (named) departments. No contextual or other
information is offered. We could explore the Sector terms to the left if we wished, and
learn more. The term, finally is categorised as IN, meaning it is an institutional term.
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3. SALESIAN VOCABULARY (semantic vocab). Since this is an html file, therefore es-
sentially a text file, it is easily searched. The smart idea would be to search on the word
‘department’ once we open that Salesian vocabulary page. This certainly expands our
understanding of the term a little further:
Under 8.2.12 supportUnit we learn that it is really a support unit only. If we were to
look up ‘sector’ we would see that it is ‘charismatic’ in nature, hence fundamental to who
Salesians are. A department on the other hand may come or go.
The translator does not only look for the right word, but needs an understanding of the
concept. Let’s say that the word was found in the phrase ‘departments of the mission’.
That phrase too, could be similarly explored by the threefold process indicated above, but
it is certainly helpful to know that whatever else it is, it is in the nature of a ‘support unit’. If
a General Chapter decides to re-organise the administrative structures, the departments
are the first ones that will be affected. The ‘sectors’ cannot ever disappear as such, but
how they are to be managed could change substantially, and that could include having
one department manage the affairs of more than one sector.
There is a further little complication we need to add here while speaking of ‘sector’. One
Salesian Sector, Youth Ministry, found it needed to do some work on a glossary for its own
purposes. The new Youth Ministry Framework document makes frequent reference to the
following terms:
(1) ambiente pastorale, or settore di attività
(2) settore d’animazione pastorale
The department concerned asked that (1) be translated as ‘pastoral or activity sector’
and that (2) become ‘pastoral animation setting’.
The argument behind this choice is that settore or ambiente as we find it in the first
instance refers to the educational and pastoral structures in which the Salesian mission is
carried out. These structures are more or less a finite set: The Oratory-Youth Centre; the
school and Vocational Training Centre and could include the pre-vocational training cen-
tre and hostel accommodation; higher institutes of education (possibly academic centres,
colleges — in the North American understanding of this term — and university student res-
idences); parishes and shrines entrusted to the Salesians (may include public churches);
various social service works for young people at risk.
In the second case, however, a settore d’animazione pastorale refers to the multiple
activities or educative and pastoral arrangements to be found across all our works and
the more traditional sectors indicated above. This is an open set, depending on cultural
circumstances and needs.
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Figure 6.1: Understanding Strennas
6.1 Strenna Stress: handing down a tough sentence
(strenna ...)
You be the judge!
Conoscendo e imitando Don Bosco, facciamo dei giovani la missione della
nostra vita
Let us make the young our life’s mission by coming to know and imitate Don
Bosco
Can you decide where the ‘focus’ of the Strenna sentence above lies? If you were saying
it aloud, where would the primary stress fall? Or put in equally linguistic terms, what is the
‘theme’ of this sentence, if we define theme as being what the speaker/writer chooses to
take as his point of departure? ‘Theme’ is a little different from ‘given’, another term the
linguist or even the grammar teacher might easily use. The ‘given’ in a sentence is from
your perspective — the reader/listener’s perspective, or what you already know about or
have accessible to you.
Hence the problem. Strenna declarations tell us what their author’s intended theme is
and they are addressed to people in a certain context who are assumed to have extra-
sentential knowledge not related to any explicit other sentence, though perhaps an implicit
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one. But my ‘given’ may be quite different from your ‘given’, and that in turn may affect
what I interpret the ‘theme’ or true focus of any particular strenna to be.
This problem begins even with the word itself. In a text for the Salesian Family only,
we would not normally translate the term, partly because it does not have an easy trans-
lation and we have a right to our own jargon, but mainly because we assume the target
audience’s prior understanding. This assumes that the reader (or listener) does actually
understand precisely where the term comes from. Strenna would be understood by the
general population in Italy, except that it might be understood today as a ‘book given for
Christmas’. This is not so far off the mark even for the Salesian context. Originally a
custom of the ancient Romans, the strenna (Latin strena or possibly from the goddess
Strenia) was, in the 19th century, already linked to prose and poetry. It was in this context
that Don Bosco gave individuals a few helpful words, first of all individuals at the Oratory,
but then extended to the group, and not so much for Christmas as for New Year. The ‘gift’
was almost always a few well-chosen words to someone who knew his audience and who
in turn knew him. It could also be a physical gift, probably in writing.
If we were to translate strenna as ‘motto’ or ‘slogan’ we would be doing it a disservice
in terms of how it was understood in Don Bosco’s earlier context (less so later when it
was addressed to his Salesians), but we may be describing it correctly for the way it is
employed today. Again, it has to be said that the one who ‘owns’ this particular Salesian
tradition, the successor of Don Bosco, has every right to do with it as he wills. Our interest
here is primarily in the challenge it presents to the translator and, importantly, why it is a
challenge. We all know it IS a challenge; the trick is to discover objective reasons for why
it is, in order to be in a position to do something about it.
It might be helpful to look at a random set of Strenna declarations in Italian (and their
official translations following each item):
Ringiovanire il volto della Chiesa, che è la madre della nostra fede (Rejuvenate
the Faith of the Church, the Mother of our Faith)
Assicurare una speciale attenzione alla famiglia, che è culla della vita e dell’amore
e luogo primario di umanizzazione. (Ensuring that special attention be given to
the family the cradle of life and love and where one first learns how to become
human)
Per una vera cultura della vita umana (For a true culture of human life)
Educhiamo con il cuore di Don Bosco, per lo sviluppo integrale della vita dei
giovani, soprattutto i più poveri e svantaggiati, promuovendo i loro diritti. (Let
us educate with the heart of Don Bosco, to develop to their full potential the
lives of young people, especially the poorest and most disadvantaged, promot-
ing their rights)
Italian is a vigorously nominalising language, which can mean using an even more abso-
lutely nominal form than a lesser one, and therein lies the problem. Consider that one
is much more like to find tra razionalità e emotività (this is a real example from a text on
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education) than tra ragione e emozione, (‘between reason and emotion’) The difference
lies in the -tà or -ità ending which strengthens the nominal form, though both razionalità
and ragione are nouns, as are emotività and emozione. English happily employs nomi-
nalisation when it feels it might be useful, but by preference seeks verbal forms. Strictly
speaking nominalisation occurs when a verb or adjective or adverb is turned into a noun or
noun-like item, but we could also express it another way, which will extend its coverage for
our purposes here: language which prefers non-finite verb forms. The strenna statements
above feature nominalisation in both the strict and wider sense. Ringiovanire is infinitive,
as is assicurare. Promovuendo in the last example is a gerund and therefore non-finite
form. The only other verbs in the entire collection above in Italian are the verb ‘to be’ (è)
and two finite examples: educhiamo, and facciamo if we count the very first example at
the beginning of the chapter. Below we will look at these two finite examples and agree
that even these are not as finite as we think! Nominal style at its best: una speciale atten-
zione ..., culla della vita e dell’amore e luogo primario di umanizzazione; no verb at all in
the second example; per lo sviluppo integrale della vita dei giovani...promovuendo i loro
diritti in the third example.
The following did not turn up in a Strenna context, but it did turn up in a Salesian
document, and it exemplifies very clearly the extent to which the translator may sometimes
have to deal with challenging nominalised forms:
Li possiamo distinguere in valori contenutistici (= crescita, sviluppo, qualità
umana dell’esistenza, promozione umana della vita personale e comunitaria,
libertà, comunitarietà. . . ), valori formali-procedurali = gradualità, adeguatezza,
pertinenza, validità, significatività; specificità, globalità, integrazione; disci-
plinarità e transversalità; efficienza e produttività; comunicatività e relazional-
ità; reciprocità e identità. . . ) e valori etici-realizzativi dell’ intervento educativo
(= ascolto, accoglienza, rispetto, apprezzamento, sostegno, orientamento, cor-
relazione, stimolazione, amore, professionalità, managerialità, autorevolezza,
ragionevolezza, saggezza,. . . )
We will not have so much difficulty with the simpler nouns, e.g. most of those found inside
the first set of parentheses (crescita, sviluppo, qualità umana dell’esistenza, promozione
umana della vita personale e comunitaria, libertà, comunitarietà), but there are some
challenges ahead with mega-nominals like the pseudo-adjective formali-procedurali and
many of the terms ending in -ità. The solution does not lie in turning as many of them as
possible into -ity terms, that is for sure. Besides, what might be the difference between
promozione umana della vita comunitaria and comunitarietà?
The translator, then, is faced with a range of problems when tackling the dense and
condensed kind of language found in strennas and other similar declarative styles:
Theme
Given the abstract nature of nominal forms, where is the real theme between conoscendo
and imitando? We have already noted that Italian word order is more flexible than English,
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so we cannot rely on ‘first position’ to establish theme in Italian and indeed may suspect
it lies towards the end. The first Strenna cited in this chapter is the most difficult of all the
examples here if we are to determine the theme which, remember, is in the mind of the
author, not the reader. Is it the act of knowing/getting to know (we cannot be sure which)
or imitating that are the point of departure? Is it what we do then (facciamo) or are we
doing that along with these acts? Is it the mission of our lives?
Lexical density
Nominalisation creates lexical density or simply put, packs more meaning into fewer words.
Umanizzazione is a classic nominalisation that English will seek to explain in several
words: ‘learn to become human’. -izzazione endings are the bane of English transla-
tion. Salesians around the world have often set up museums. Could they be said to
engage in musealizzazione? Google it and you will find 200 plus reasonable examples
of this term. As someone said, regarding this latter on Wordreference, a very useful aid
for translators, “at best in English we might have to say ‘the process of turning X into a
museum/of creating a museum out of X/of incorporating X as part of a/the museum’ or
some such (depending — to a huge extent — on the context). Basically, it’s an awful word
to have to translate.”
Semantic density
On the other hand nominalisation extends apposition or that practice whereby two ele-
ments, usually noun phrases, are placed side by side, each modifying or explaining the
other. Culla della vita and luogo primario di umanizzazione are both in apposition to ‘fam-
ily’. This creates an additional semantic density. There is less hierarchy in content and it
is harder to make logical links.
Timelessness
The lack of a conjugated verb gives a certain timelessness to the declaration, which also
makes it harder to pin down.
Exhortation
The -iamo (1st person plural form in Italian) is trickier than one might first suspect. We
can agree that we are dealing with a volitional mood. The author of the declaration
wants/wishes something to happen. But there are different ways of achieving that wish.
Consider this little exchange in that wonderful though politically incorrect comedy Fawlty
Towers:
Sybil Fawlty : Basil doesn’t bet on the horses anymore, do you?
Basil Fawlty : No, that particular avenue of pleasure has been closed off.
Sybil Fawlty : And we don’t want it opened up again, do we ?
Basil Fawlty : No, you don’t, dear.
The humour comes from the way 3rd person singular and 1st person plural are being used
as 2nd person address. So the use of 1st person plural can, in English, and one presumes
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also in Italian, have a degree of coercion to it.
Adesso, per favore, ascoltiamo la lezione in silenzio! Ragazzi, non perdiamo
tempo!
Normally, however, the 1st person plural employed as a polite form of imperative-encouragement
(exhortation) will be indicated with ‘let’ in English (or the more informal ‘let’s’). Italian does
not have this option. French has an option of its own: the -ons form, which seems to be
less direct and therefore more polite. But it would be wrong to think that the Italian -iamo
used as an exhortation, is indicative. It is instead subjunctive, and subjunctive is also less
direct than indicative, or put another way, the verb involved is yet to be realised.
facciamo dei giovani la missione della nostra vita
faisons des jeunes la mission de notre vie
let us make the young our life’s mission
There is a different mood in all three, slight though it may be! The Italian is closest to the
idea that the verb (what we have to do) is not yet realised and that it is the speaker’s wish
that it be so. The French is the most polite and detached of the three. The English, with
its ‘let us’ is the most cohortative of them: we do this together!
You begin to understand, then, the problem every Strenna declaration presents the
translator with: theme, lexical and semantic density, timelessness, and the level of exhor-
tation involved are no small matters to resolve.
Matters do not improve when it comes to even more crucial declarations like a General
Chapter theme. Testimoni della radicalità evangelica has no verb and is entirely made up
of nominalised forms. In both cases, Strenna and Chapter, we have what in Italian might
be called an enunciato, which in English might be translated as a thesis statement. An
English language thesis statement will be substantially different from one in Italian for all
the reasons adduced above.
6.2 When translations are considered originals
(ambiente popolare, poveri—più poveri, promozione, pasotrale giovanile, settore, dicast-
ero, coesione, disegno, progetto, don ...)
The dense formulations of volitional (Strenna) or programmatic (Chapter theme) texts
are one kind of challenge. An even more demanding one, and fortunately it comes around
less frequently, is how to adequately translate prescriptive texts, such as constitutions
and regulations. But maybe it comes around even too infrequently! This essay takes the
view that 40 years are about as long as the translation of the Salesian Constitutions and
Regulations can stand without closer scrutiny and in view of several factors: intervening
General Chapters have added, adjusted or subtracted items; the extensive investigation
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into Don Bosco’s thinking and praxis over recent years has brought new understanding
of what he meant when he said certain things; language changes; cultural circumstances
change. There may be additional motives to these, but seen together they are sufficient
to warrant another look at the existing translation which dates back to the early 1980s.
You see, for many individuals in the English-speaking world (by which I mean English
spoken as a first or other language by Salesians on a regular basis), the only constitutions
and regulations they may know are in English. For them it is not even considered as a
translation but as an original. There is nothing strange about this. Authenticated transla-
tions of prescriptive texts are widely regarded (e.g. in the legal world, or in a context like
the European Union) as being as inviolate as the original texts.
Preparatory to some comments on the current translation of the Constitutions and Reg-
ulations, it might be helpful to establish a platform that can support such comments. It
must be a translators’ platform, based on matters that come from that kind of experience
and those kinds of ‘norms’. We can hardly wade into matters of interpretation of the
charism, but the translator has some responsibility closely aligned to that.
A translator would assume, confronted with a prescriptive text, that there is a higher
literal requirement involved. The Salesian constitutions are remarkable for their less-than-
legal feel, but they are a prescriptive genre nonetheless. The constitutions were a special
achievement, widely recognised in the consecrated life world. The regulations are regula-
tions, and more obviously prescriptive. In both cases, though, the translator feels obliged
to strive to achieve a text which is equal in meaning and equal in its prescriptive effect.
A degree of interpretation is inevitable in translation but again, given a prescriptive
genre, the aim will be to translate what is said, not what we think ought to have been
said. If conceptual incongruity appears (as it may quite easily if a certain concept does
not exactly fit in another culture and language), then it has to be very carefully resolved.
The translation of constitutions and regulations will take into account every level of lan-
guage, as is the case for any other kind of text: the phonic/graphic, prosodic, lexical,
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic/discourse levels, and given that languages and cultures
change and develop over time, and not necessarily all in the same ways, there will be
changes needed to a translation done many years ago.
With that much to guide us, let’s take a look at some issues.
C. 33: Lavoriamo in ambienti popolari e per i giovani poveri. Li educhiamo
alle responsabilità morali, professionali e sociali, collaborando con loro, e con-
tribuiamo alla promozione del gruppo e dell’ambiente.
We labour in economically depressed areas and for poor youth. We collab-
orate with them, educating them to a sense of moral, professional and social
responsibility. In this way we contribute to the development of both people and
environment.
We can note, initially, what the translator(s) at the time did. We need to take quite every-
thing into account.
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‘labour’ tells us that British spelling is employed and therefore, one assumes, this is
consistent throughout the complete text (C&R).
The term ambienti popolari has been glossed as ‘economically depressed areas’. We
may assume that both ambiente/i and popolare/i and possibly close synonyms to them ap-
pear elsewhere. How have they been translated? Ambiente appears anyway as the final
word of the citation, and is glossed as ‘environment’. Giovani poveri becomes ‘poor youth’
(giovani=young people, gioventù=youth), and while both are a noun+adjective combina-
tion, ‘youth’ is more abstract than ‘young people’. Promozione becomes ‘development’
and gruppo becomes ‘people’.
The Italian has two sentences, the English three. As for the way the second Italian
sentence is split, we note that the question of focus enters once again. There are two
indicatives, first person plurals, in the Italian (they are not exhortative or volitional ‘let
us’, but what we do); likewise in English. But the difference is that the verb ‘educate’ is
finite in Italian (educhiamo), while ‘collaborate’ (collaborando) is a gerund and therefore
weaker; in the English translation it is the other way around. The focus in English is on
collaboration. The focus in Italian is on education. English also ‘educates’ to a ‘sense
of’ various kinds of responsibility. Italian educates directly to these responsibilities.
There is enough here to warrant a second look at this article from a translation point of
view.
The split into three sentences could be expected, since we know that the Italian sen-
tence will often be longer, more syntactically complex. But the shift in focus as a result of
this split is not expected. The final sentence in English introduces an interpretation that
may or may not be warranted. ‘in this way’ has replaced the Italian conjunction e (and),
but we know that in discourse terms, ‘in this way’ has a different function; it is anaphora
— creates a link with something already said. In the Italian original, the phrase ‘e con-
tribuiamo ...’ is not linked to what was said earlier. If you like, it is new information. And
the translators clearly thought gruppo was an odd term to have there, so translated it as
‘people’. This too is an interpretation.
The common understanding of popolare in Italian is ‘of the masses’, the ordinary folk;
you will find such things as religiosità popolare (popular religiosity), people live in a quartierie
popolare (popular or ordinary working-class suburb) and so on. An ambiente popolare is
such a setting. The ceti popolari would be that sector of society which is at that level
— working-class, ordinary people. If we look at how these terms have been translated
elsewhere in the C&R we get the impression that the English translation interprets this
popolare in a more negative way than might be intended by the original. C. 7 — working
class, C. 29 — poor people in general, C. 118 — the poor. R. 1 — common people R. 4 —
poor areas, R. 16 — low-income population. ‘Economically depressed’ is not necessarily
wrong, by the way. But the term is stronger than that suggested by ‘working class’ and
‘common people’.
At this point it might be useful to introduce a discussion on ‘poor’ which was an excursus
by Fr Arthur Lenti on the use of the ‘poor, poorer, poorest’ set in Salesian language.
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The Latin forms pauperes, pauperiores, pauperrimi (Italian, poveri, più poveri,
i più poveri/poverissimi; English, poor, poorer, poorest) constitute a system
having a twofold semantic value. These forms may be used either in an “ab-
solute” fashion as quantifiers, or in a “relative” fashion as classifiers. As quan-
tifiers they express the quantity or the intensity of a person’s poverty “abso-
lutely,” that is, without comparison to the poverty of other persons. As classi-
fiers they express the poverty of a person “relatively,” that is by comparison to
the poverty of other persons. (Arthur J. Lenti, Don Bosco — History and Spirit,
Vol 4, Beginnings of the Salesian Society and its Constitutions)
His conclusion is that:
“poor, poorer, poorest” in the chapter on Purpose, and indeed throughout the
Constitutions [Don Bosco’s original Constitutions, approved 1875], are used as
quantifiers, not classifiers. It was not Don Bosco’s intention to classify young
people by the criterion of poverty and to choose the poorest of all to the exclu-
sion of others.
Two matters here. Note his conclusion that Don Bosco was not intending to classify young
people (and by extension could we also think people in general?) by the criterion of
poverty. We should also look at how the ‘poor, poorer, poorest’ set is translated in the
current Constitutions. In fact it also creates some confusion, e.g.
C. 2 — i più poveri becomes ‘poor’
C. 26 — i più poveri becomes ‘those who are poorer’
when we know that the term i più poveri is the superlative in both cases.
All in all, Article 33 of the current Constitutions in English, and along with it a handful of
other articles that employ similar terms and ideas, could benefit from some revision.
If there is the possibility that translation has gone in for some unwarranted but also
understandable (maybe) interpretation in the case above, there are several instances in
the constitutional text where the English text clearly adds or subtracts something, and this
looks like interpretation. Con Cristo nell’ascolto della Parola becomes ‘with Christ in the
Word’ (C. 36) and in the light of today’s insistence on Lectio Divina, this seems like an
omission to rectify in the future. In C. 55 the Italian refers just to young people; the English
adds, ‘for whom we work’. C. 17 speaks of St Francis de Sales’ humanism; the English
text calls it ‘optimistic humanism’.
C. 88 may need a closer look.
L’ascolto della Parola trova il suo luogo privilegiato nella celebrazione dell’Eucaristia.
Essa è l’atto centrale quotidiano di ogni comunità salesiana, vissuto come una
festa in una liturgia viva.
The hearing of the Word finds its privileged place in the celebration of the
Eucharist. This is the central act of every Salesian community: it is a daily
festive celebration in a living liturgy.
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6 Translating the charism
vissuta come una festa in una liturgia viva, if translated literally, would read, ‘lived like a
feast in a living liturgy’, but is that what ‘a daily festive celebration in a living liturgy’ is
saying?
There are other issues which are of translation interest. Recall we pointed out above
that ‘labour’ indicated British spelling? That is a choice, and the important thing is to be
consistent. When we come, then, to other orthographic choices, we expect consistency
— -ize versus -ise. In fact both are acceptable in British English, but the important thing
is to be consistent: ‘recognise’ or ‘recognize’ but not both. The constitutional text under
discussion uses both forms, though mainly the -ize form. Capitalisation is another issue.
It would be standard practice in both British and American orthography to capitalise ad-
jectives, adverbs or verbs which derive from a proper noun. Christian and Salesian are
both proper nouns, so their adjectival forms would be capitalised. Yet the constitutional
text does not do this and refers to ‘christian’ and ‘salesian’ in adjectival form.
There are terminological issues. At least one of these is something that has developed
over time. When the Constitutions were first translated, it was acceptable to translate
Pastorale Giovanile as ‘Youth Apostolate’. The term ‘youth ministry’ (or its capitalised
form) is of relatively recent usage in Salesian discourse and is linked also to a shift in the
theological appreciation of what the matter is about, in other words the Church itself sees
‘ministry’ as something done within the Church, while ‘apostolate’ is something done more
in the secular world; outside of the constitutional text one also occasionally finds ‘youth
pastoral’. This latter, though still found in some parts of the English-speaking Salesian
world is regarded as a calque, a direct translation of pastorale giovanile that does not sit
with standard English, which regards ‘pastoral’ as an adjective in most instances and, if
used as a noun, in reference to things other than ministry or that matter, apostolate. C.
133 and C. 136 employ ‘youth apostolate’ where arguably today they should say ‘youth
ministry’.
Another terminological issue is rather more important. The English text does not keep to
the distinction between settore and dicastero which is clearly marked in the Italian original.
C. 133. I consiglieri incaricati di settori speciali sono: il consigliere per la
formazione, il consigliere per la pastorale giovanile, il consigliere per la comu-
nicazione sociale, il consigliere per le missioni e l’economo generale.
The Councillors in charge of special departments are: the Councillor for for-
mation, the Councillor for the youth apostolate, the Councillor for social com-
munication, the Councillor for the missions and the economer general.
Apart from the fact that C. 133 provides additional evidence of orthographic matters
already discussed, note the ‘special departments’. Sectors should be the term here.
Whether they have a councillor or not in the future, the sectors are charismatic and will re-
main. They may have a councillor and no department, or no councillor and no department
— but the sector will still be there.
Then comes a concrete issue of Salesian poverty: to invest or not to invest, as pre-
scribed by C. 187 and R. 187. We can look at the relevant wording in C. 187.
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È da escludere l’acquisto e la conservazione di beni immobili a solo scopo
di reddito e ogni altra forma permanente di capitalizzazione fruttifera, salvo
quanto previsto all’articolo 188 delle Costituzioni.
Acquiring and holding real estate with the sole object of producing income,
and every other kind of interest-bearing investment is forbidden, except in the
cases referred to in article 188 of the Constitutions.
At the 26th General Chapter an interpretation had been requested by the incoming Economer
General. The out-going Economer General had responded to a question about interest-
bearing investments, pointing out that the English translation of C. 187 was defective: the
Italian talks about excluding "every other form of permanent capitalizzazione fruttifera",
while the English text says that "every other kind of interest-bearing investment is forbid-
den". As can be seen, the English text excludes the word permanente or ongoing, and
also chooses to translate capitalizzazione fruttifera as ‘interest-bearing investment’. If we
were to follow the English text strictly, even the usual investments in savings accounts and
fixed deposits would be excluded.
The Procurator General weighed in on the argument with an interpretation that went
along the lines of upholding the canonical and traditionally Salesian exclusion of interest-
bearing investments (for want of a better translation!), but there could be certain problems
with this position. Thus, for example, when we leave large sums of money for lengths
of time with a bank in savings accounts or fixed deposits, we have absolutely no control
over the way this money is invested by the bank, and it is quite possible that it is invested
in unethical ways, as for example in the armaments industry. This could be avoided if
we chose to invest instead directly in certain industries or businesses with certain ethical
guarantees. In other words, this might be a case where there is a cultural shift going on
and in the changed circumstances of finance and industry today we may need to see that
there is a shift from considerations of interest-bearing capitalisation to those of ethical
investment.
Complicated? Well, yes, but the translator can rarely take refuge in simplicity!
There are other minor issues where ‘false friends’ creep in:
C. 61 Don Bosco fa spesso notare quanto la pratica sincera dei voti rinsaldi
i vincoli dell’amore fraterno e la coesione nell’azione apostolica.
Don Bosco frequently points out how the sincere practice of the vows strength-
ens the bonds of brotherly love and makes our apostolic work coherent.
‘Cohesion’? Hopefully our apostolic work is always coherent, but is it consistent with ‘the
sincere practice ....’? That is what the article is attempting to say.
There are several instances where we are asked to be ‘docile to the Holy Spirit’. One
suspects this too is a false friend and that we are being asked to be obedient, submissive
even (note an earlier comment however where docile has the sense of ‘gentle’). Disegno is
always translated as ‘design’ and collocates each time with God. God’s ‘design’, or God’s
plan? Progetto is given a variety of translations, as it should be, and only occasionally is
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6 Translating the charism
it called ‘project’ but in the first article of the Constitutions, forze apostoliche are rendered
as ‘projects’, and that seems a bit odd.
And finally, having being at a General Chapter many years ago where European partici-
pants (except those from England and Ireland) were very much amused by pleas for more
sensitive language where gender is concerned we can note that the English constitutional
text is full of references to ‘men’ ‘brothers’ (where not only confreres are implied), and
even a phrase like tutto a tutti is translated as ‘all things to all men’. The complete text
could benefit from an overhaul in this regard, even in the original Italian, since member
countries of today’s European Union are asked to be sensitive to these matters, not only
those who speak English.
6.3 A rose by any other name ...
What do we do about non-English names and even titles when it comes to translation?
Recently, when translating an extensive guidebook on the Don Bosco places in Piedmont,
a book that also contains plenty of historical information by way of contextualising these
places, I stated in the ‘translator’s note’ in the introduction:
Although it is a descriptive not prescriptive science, translation science dic-
tates inner consistency in translation choices throughout a text. There is no
clear descriptive or prescriptive rule concerning ‘name’ translation, but the
modern tendency is not to translate modern names of people, places — though
always with exceptions, and there are many of these! Salesian readers in En-
glish are by now accustomed to ‘John’ rather than ‘Giovanni’, (and so on for
other names which have direct English counterparts) for our major figures,
so expect John, Joseph, Anthony Bosco, Michael Rua etc., but Secondo or
Evaristo will remain as such, clearly. Where the figures are less known to the
‘Salesian’ reader, the original names will be retained in most instances, even
when there is a commonly known English version of that name. ‘Don’ has been
replaced by ’Father’ (or Fr) in most instances — except for Don Bosco.
There could even be cases (rare) where one could say ‘Father Bosco’, for example when
explaining why Don Bosco chose Don rather than Padre. Diocesan clergy in Italy are
always Don (or don) while most religious priests use Padre. Bosco was a diocesan priest
and for good reasons wanted to avoid anything that associated him (in Italy’s secular and
revolutionary society) with the old religious orders.
Could there be a rule of thumb when translating this title (don) for our Rector Majors?
There could be — it could be as simple as reserving the Italian title for Don Bosco and
translating the rest as Father or Fr. An alternative might be to accept that until a certain
period in the Congregation’s history, perhaps up until Vatican II, we were all happy with
Don, but that it sounds more and more odd, today, to refer to a Rector Major who is not
Italian as Don Chávez. Personally I prefer the first suggestion.
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7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other
genres of holiness
Figure 7.1: 1874 Latin draft of the Constitutions and Regulations
7.1 Iconographic discourse and hyperbole
(inserimento, il mondo di ...)
In the earlier discussion on translations which recipients regard as ‘originals’, for all in-
tents and purposes, such as constitutions or other texts of a normative or prescriptive kind,
we are presuming that the reader/listener does not recognise certain kinds of mismatches
or, put another way, that the text is easily, or relatively easily accepted as speaking to
the target culture (even though it may have been conceived and produced in an entirely
different culture). This may be the case for a number of reasons. It could be that there
is a fully shared culture involved (certainly that would be the hope in the case of Salesian
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7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other genres of holiness
texts) which is over and above local differences. In the case of a Salesian text, this would
mean, for example, that specific usages like animazione or assistenza when translated as
‘animation’ and ‘assistance’ respectively, are so well accepted in the universal Salesian
context that they do not mark the text out as ‘different’. It could also be, of course, that the
translator had foreseen any problems of mismatch and had already solved them.
But there are certain text genres, also common enough in a Salesian context, where
the recipient immediately recognises that this is a text in translation, not because there
are errors but because there are contextual mismatches; the text clearly comes from a
cultural and maybe historical setting different from one’s own.
Without wanting to enter into the convoluted set of issues surrounding the translation of
the texts for the Mass (not only into English; the same texts are also under revision in other
languages), suffice it to say that the new Mass text in English immediately lets the reader
and listener know that this is a translated text. Word choice and sentence structures may
be part of it, but whatever it is, we recognise that this text belongs to a culture different
from our own.
So, liturgical texts (for example prayers, prefaces, just to name two in this category),
brief or even longer accounts of saints or men and women on their way to ‘the altar’, some
newsletters (Cagliero11 comes to mind as a newsletter encouraging mission-mindedness
in the Salesian world), even homilies, and the range of ‘legacy’ texts (Don Bosco’s volumi-
nous writings, for example) might all exhibit, in translation, this sense of being different, at
times even being strange and odd — unless the translator has worked very hard to over-
come conceptual, contextual and other mismatches and even then the ‘difference’ may
not be completely overcome. Nor need it be overcome in certain instances — many of the
legacy texts referred to above should retain their difference, at least to some degree.
Translation in these situations becomes a very complex task. If the time it takes to do
a good translation is any indication it is many times more complex than producing a text
within one’s own language and culture.
Here is a simple example of the problem. An Italian Salesian text on education may
well speak of the finalità (end purpose) of education being l’inserimento del giovane nel
mondo del lavoro. Now, to translate that as ‘insertion into the world of work’ is a kind
of abstraction that does not fit well with the more concrete anglophone mindset, and the
passage may well go on to discuss connections with ‘the world of business’ and ‘the world
of politics’ and so on! We would prefer, in English, to talk about ‘providing them with the
skills needed for finding work’ or ‘getting a job’. We might also want them to have business
acumen and be politically involved. In any case we leave ‘the world’ out of it.
Translation, especially of some of the genres earlier indicated, almost always involves
different passes. The first pass will attempt to deal with lower-level linguistic mismatches
(often word choice, word order, that sort of thing) and happens almost unconsciously. But
other adjustments are made in subsequent passes, and crucially, these later adjustments
involve conscious choice. They are no longer a simple matter of subconscious fluency or
intuition.
These later passes involve conscious analysis and choices and, like it or not, these can
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7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other genres of holiness
interfere with native-speaker intuitions! Discourse organisation, for example, needs to be
consciously considered in later passes.
None of this is a new problem. If we are to believe Peter Braido, writing about possible
sources for Don Bosco’s ideas on ‘preventive education’ other than his experience, he
may have had to think about a text or two in translation himself:
Confidential reminders for Rectors ... The document as a whole may have
drawn some kind of inspiration from a booklet written by the Jesuit Father
Binet ... Don Bosco may have had the chance to read this booklet in its Italian
edition, translated by the Jesuit Father Anthony Bresciani ... The text which
had as title The Art of Leadership, was preceded by a note written by the
translator in which he displayed rather conservative ideas aimed at forewarning
people against modern permissive and populist tendencies and possibly or
even actually affecting families, society and even the world of politics. (Pietro
Braido, Prevention Not Repression, Kristu Jyoti Publications 2013)
But let’s come to the point today for the translator by taking up the question of hagiog-
raphy. Hagiography is a well-established genre under the broad mantle of ‘biography’.
Hagiography encompasses an extremely diverse body of writing, including martyrologies,
narratives of martyrdom, historical memoirs, literary compositions, liturgical texts, hagio-
graphical compilations, as well as the scientific study of these documents. Our interest
here is not so much to explore the genre and all its interesting features, but to arrive at
some guidelines for translating it and that means looking at it as a discourse feature. We
shall regard ‘discourse’ as being a level of analysis beyond the sentence.
Rather than talking about it theoretically, let’s take an example from outside the Salesian
corpus of texts in this area. Since the texts could be quite long, we need to limit ourselves
to excerpts, but hopefully these can suffice.
St Josaphat - Bishop and Martyr
... Both these distinctions fell to Josaphat, archbishop of Polock of the
Slavonic rite of the Eastern Church. He is rightly looked upon as the great
glory and strength of the Eastern Rite Slavs. Few have brought them greater
honour or contributed more to their spiritual welfare than Josaphat, their pastor
and apostle, especially when he gave his life as a martyr for the unity of the
Church. He felt, in fact, that God had inspired him to restore world-wide unity
to the Church and he realised that his greatest chance of success lay in pre-
serving the Slavonic rite and Saint Basil’s rule of monastic life within the one
universal Church.
Concerned mainly with seeing his own people reunited to the see of Pe-
ter, he sought out every available argument which would foster and maintain
Church unity. His best arguments were drawn from liturgical books sanctioned
by the Fathers of the Church, which were in common use among Christians,
including the dissidents. Thus thoroughly prepared, he set out to restore the
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7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other genres of holiness
unity of the Church. A forceful man of fine sensibilities, he met with such suc-
cess that his opponents dubbed him “the thief of souls.” (Taken from Pope Pius
XI’s ‘Ecclesiam Dei’)
Now compare this to the following:
He was born in the Ukraine of Orthodox parents. In 1595 the Union of Brest
brought the Ruthenian Church into communion with Catholic Rome while still
preserving its own liturgy. The result was a schism within the church itself,
with one party wanting to remain Orthodox and in the orbit of Moscow and
Constantinople, while the other accepted the Union. Matters were complicated
by the presence of the Greek Uniates, a remnant of a century-old attempt at
church union (who remain a living church today).
Josaphat joined the first monastery of the Order of St Basil to be united
to the Catholic Church: he was the first person to do so. He was ordained
priest and, eventually and reluctantly, appointed Bishop of Polotsk in 1617.
Although Sigismund III Vasa, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania,
supported the union, the local aristocracy were against it because it threatened
their control of ecclesiastical benefices. Plotting with the Orthodox Patriarch
of Jerusalem, who visited the Ukraine in 1621, they stirred up trouble and as
a result Josaphat was murdered by a mob in 1623 while on a pastoral visit to
Vitebsk. (Taken from the Universalis online version of the Liturgy of the Hours,
brief description of the Saint of the day).
Can we identify, even in structural terms, how these two items have distinct discourse
patterns? If we can, this will help the translator, who inevitably has to make discourse
choices amongst others.
There are extra-textual differences we need to know about, obviously. Authorship is
one of them. The first example is hagiography from the highest authority, a Pope no less.
The second is hagiography from a priest in a British diocese. The textual context bears
similar differences, though a little more complicated to describe. An encyclical carries
more weight than an introduction to a liturgical text in a semi-official version of the Liturgy
of the Hours. But Universalis also lives up to its name, and is widely used in an era
when digitally available liturgical texts are regarded highly by those who choose to use
this medium (in fact the version above comes from a epub-cum-Ipad medium). It is also
possible that both authors are using common sources for their information, possibly the
Roman Martyrology, and that both are offering us different ‘translations’ (broadly speaking)
of this.
Could we use the term ‘iconographic discourse’ of both? I believe we can, though only
by extending the notion somewhat. But calling the first text ‘iconographic’ could be quite
helpful for us. Consider the following:
The familiar argument regarding images as the “Bible” of the illiterate has
already established an association between imago and littera so that imago
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7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other genres of holiness
came to be applied not only to pictorial representations of saints but also their
verbal ones in sermones and hagiography ... Not only conceptually, but also
stylistically the verbal representation of saints tried to imitate iconography. The
main stylistic features of an icon are ‘its absolute stasis’, its denial of earthly
realism, and its conventionality ... a lack of narrative progression. (Image
and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse (ed) David B Downing, Susan
Bazargan, State University of New York 1991, pp. 36-37)
This puts a finger on something that is especially obvious in the first example — the ‘abso-
lute stasis’ and the lack of narrative progression. Quite in contrast with the second exam-
ple, but I believe we can also extend the term ‘iconography’ to this postmodern example,
in an era when TV, Internet, YouTube, Instagram etc. can be new ways of representing ho-
liness. The second example is also hagiography but with fewer conceptual and contextual
mismatches for us.
There is another difference, and for this we need to return to a more traditional discourse
feature: hyperbole. Note in the first example: ‘great glory and strength’, ‘Few have brought
them greater honour or contributed more’, ‘greatest chance of success’, ‘every available
argument’, ‘best arguments’, ‘Thoroughly prepared’, ‘forceful man of fine sensibilities’,
‘such success’.
Hyperbole can come in many shapes and sizes. In some cases the semantic domain is
preserved (e.g. if I were to say ‘freezing’ in place of merely ‘chilly’), or there can be com-
posite hyperbole, which switches domains by combining with metaphor or other figures of
speech (e.g. Josaphat is an ‘apostle’). There can be single-word hyperbole (the adverb
‘every’), phrasal (e.g. ‘great glory and strength’ ), clausal (e.g. ‘Few have brought them
greater honour or contributed more’), numerical (e.g. if I were to say ‘a hundred and ten
percent’), superlative (e.g. ‘greatest chance’), comparative (e.g. if I were to say ‘shake like
a leaf’), and repetitive forms (e.g. if I were to say ‘loads and loads and loads of it’). The
papal hagiographic example employs several of these kinds of hyperbole, the second vir-
tually none (‘he was the first’ is a statement of fact but could also be considered hyperbolic
at a stretch); in fact, if we were to consider the term ‘martyr’ to be a form of hyperbole in
itself within the hagiographic context, consider the (shocking?) contrast when our second
author says that Josaphat was ‘murdered by a mob’. That is a bit postmodern!
There is a fascinating discussion of this very issue by none other than Don Bosco him-
self in the (recently translated) story of Severino. We already know where Don Bosco
would stand on the difference between ‘martyrdom’ and ‘murder by a mob’, but it is good
to see it in action, so to speak:
"There was a time," the evangelist began [note: the Waldensian evangelist
whom Severino is travelling to Switzerland with], "when brute strength tried to
impose its religious beliefs; this was the Pope, who amongst others sent in
the Dominican, Pavonio. Our people had often advised him to keep quiet and
get out while he was safe and sound but he refused to give in and they had
to confront him. He boldly stated that he would never cease to preach the
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7 “Genreflections”: hagiography and other genres of holiness
Catholic religion until his dying day. Because of his obstinacy he was followed
and attacked in this square and torn to pieces by the infuriated mob ...”
[Now Don Bosco’s authorial comment on the above] ... On 9 April, the Sun-
day after Easter, at 9 in the morning Fr Antonio celebrated Mass in the parish
church at Bricherasio after giving a fervent sermon. As he came out of the
church into the public square he was attacked by seven hired assassins who
savagely killed him, raining blows on him without him offering the least re-
sistance. So he went to the wedding feast of the Lamb carrying the palm of
martyrdom. (Severino, or the adventures of an Alpine lad as told by himself
and presented by Fr John Bosco)
Hagiography is a regularly appearing feature for the Salesian translator. What is ex-
pressed above is not to suggest that the translator not be faithful to the text in front of
him (or her), but that discourse considerations should be taken into account and for this
genre in particular these might be nominated as iconographic and hyperbolic features
which could be mitigated or transformed contextually for particular target audiences.
7.2 Translating the 19th century
(Collegio, studiare ... )
Why should it be so difficult translating the 19th century Don Bosco (I mean in terms of
19th century, not DB’s handwriting which is notoriously difficult)? Because to begin with
you have to make a decision about words: if it is, say, a text written by Don Bosco himself.
He wrote in Italian, with occasional Piedmontese words or phrases and mostly, though not
entirely, from the 1850’s onwards. Napoleon’s 1850 invasion of Italy ironically propelled
the language towards its standard form. For the translation to have an authentic feel about
it, it should not translate certain terms he used with words that only came into the English
language in the 20th century, or we should be aware that terms he used have changed
meaning since.
When Don Bosco spoke of a collegio, he meant a boarding school and may have even
thought more of a junior seminary than anything else. Today, certainly in many English-
speaking countries, a college may or may not have a boarding section and more than
likely not. It will also mean different things to different people, depending on local context.
In some places it implies a private school as distinct from a state-run school.
Today we are trying to get back to the mind and heart of Don Bosco. There is a need
for care in translating a number of terms he uses.
Io per voi studio
In what is known as the Cronaca dell’Oratorio ( think of it as a diary of events) by Fr
Domenico Ruffino, one of the early Salesians, we find these words that Don Bosco told
his Salesians one day:
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Io per voi studio, per voi lavoro, per voi vivo, per voi sono disposto anche a
dare la vita, (ASC 110, quaderno 5, p. 10).
Since 1859 Fr Rufino had begun to scrupulously note down any sayings or deeds of Don
Bosco’s which he himself was witness to, and in 1861 he had actually set up a Commission
to this effect with a few others. In one of the 5 exercise books he compiled between 1861
and 1864 we find the above sentence. Later we find these words brought into the 1984
versions of the Constitutions, in Article 14.
At first sight it might seem that Io per voi studio is in reference to studies Don Bosco
had done to prepare himself for his pastoral and educational mission. But the words
actually say more than this. The meaning of the verb studiare in Don Bosco’s language
can have a much broader application. It has a strong Piedmontese resonance to begin
with; “studié” can mean thinking seriously how to go about something, look for ways to
resolve a problem, get down to the nitty-gritty of how to work through an issue. In our case
it is one of the most frequent ‘Piedmontese-isms’ that we find in Don Bosco’s writings (and
sayings). He might have written and spoken in Italian, but he thought in Piedmontese. We
get a better sense of this by considering writings that he himself never intended to be
published: the Memoirs of the Oratory of St Francis de Sales being a classic case in
point. We can also see it in correspondence Don Bosco held with the early Salesians.
Here is an example: in a letter he wrote on 23 July 1861 to the boys at the Oratory (he
was at Lanzo at the time) he said:
Se volete fare una cosa graditissima e nel tempo stesso, piacevole al Sig-
nore ed utile alle anime vostre, studiate di essere regolati nel pregare (If you
want to do something really pleasing to me and for the Lord at the same time,
then really make an effort to be regular with your prayer) (E 243).
In another letter in 1867 to the boys at Mirabello, a junior seminary, really, he wrote:
Studio ora il modo di ricompensare il ritardo [a farvi visita] con la più lunga dimora tra
di voi (I am going to try to make up for the delay [in visiting you] by spending rather more
time amongst you (E 568).
And just one more example which is even clearer still. On one occasion he wrote to Fr
Rua, it was 1874, about some boys at the Oratory that needed to perhaps be moved on.
About one of them he says “Se sta con noi ci darà da studiare”, “ci darà dei grattacapi”
(from the Piedmontese: dé da studié). The two sentences mean that the boy is giving us
something to think about. He is a worry!
As we can see, in all these cases the verb studiare does not mean ‘doing studies’ but
something quite different. Which brings us back to Io per voi studio.
An authoritative interpretation by the Rector Major, Fr Juan Vecchi, in a letter to Sale-
sians on 15 September 1997, removes any doubt about the wider interpretation of this
sentence: Io per voi studio (AGC, No 361). He says clearly in this that the word studio
should not be restricted to studies: Io per voi studio: it makes us think also of a Don Bosco
who could seek times and places which foster active solitude, recollection and planning”.
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Likewise studia di farti amare is not best translated by ‘Study how to make yourself
loved’ but by something along the lines of ‘find ways to make yourself loved’ or could even
be explained a little further with additions like ‘do your best to discover ways ...’
There are other matters that come into the question of translating Don Bosco. He did
some translation himself! We know he spoke French and that he wrote in French. For
example many items of correspondence are in his relatively limited or formulaic French.
He would often translate Latin quotations (not always accurately) from the Vulgate. But
when it came to an important document, such as the talk he gave in Nice on the Preventive
System, which has come down to us now as a classic, he asked that it be translated into
French by someone else. Peter Braido has a comment on this:
... secure, fluent, grammatically as well as syntactically and stylistically cor-
rect. It was probably a French speaker or at least someone with an excellent
command of the language. It does not always show familiarity with everyday
Salesian language and so, if we take a particular concept, it may develop it
freely, broadening it and almost explaining it also probably because of a per-
sonal pedagogical culture on the part of the translator. (Pietro Braido, Don
Bosco the Educator, translated into English in 2013. The comment though is
in relation to the Preventive System text delivered in Nice, France, 1877)
We note that grammatical and stylistic fluency were not the whole story of the transla-
tion. There was the matter of familiarity with Salesian discourse, the felt need to explain
‘because of a personal pedagogical culture’; a degree of interpretative licence, indeed!
It is interesting that, according to Braido, Don Bosco took this text, reviewed it, and any
corrections he added “seemed almost entirely irrelevant.” In other words he accepted it,
altered to some degree as it may have been.
The area of translation of the enormous corpus of early Salesian literature, be it of Don
Bosco or others, is too substantial to continue with here. Suffice it to say that we need
to develop a translation culture in the Salesian anglophone world which can work steadily
towards bringing much of this corpus into English, and that it requires an effort of the
translator that goes beyond competence in the languages involved. Fortunately there are
many useful aids, some already mentioned (e.g. Termbase, authoritative interpretations
by Rector Majors or others already to be found in English) and others that can be found in
libraries, such as Car ij mè fieuj: miei cari figlioli. Il dialetto piemontese nella vita e negli
scritti di Don Bosco, by Natale Cerrato, LAS, 1982.
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Figure 8.1: Translation memory
We are increasingly aware that what we are translating will end up in one or other digital
form (probably on the Web, but this is not the only digital form), and that has implications
for how we translate. We are also just as aware that we are using digital know-how to
make the translation task a little easier. It is worth considering both of these issues.
8.1 Digital is today’s lingua franca
Whether or not they recognise it, many humans today are bilingual in a way that would
surprise them. They speak a native tongue and digitalese, if by the latter we mean not
some sort of jargon but the very fact that they interact with computers and hence with the
digital world. It is a kind of language involving mainly the fingers and particular ways of
thinking, and making some special choices.
We will often be translating a text that is in one or other digital format and intended to
remain either in that format or be output to another. This is the case even if it is a ‘Word’
document. But being ultimately a digital format, as real as it may seem ‘Word’ is partly
chimera for all practical purposes, as we will discover if we hit the wrong button and lose
what we just did! It happens!
What follows is not an excursus into the wonders or woes of using a computer, but of
the implications that flow from translating in a digital world.
Let’s take the case that confronts any Salesian translator today. Every province and
almost every house has a website these days, our NGOs and other associated organisa-
tions have their websites, and our superiors at the highest levels can be more secure in
the thought that their ideas or directions will reach everyone intended to read them (and
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uncountable others not directly intended to) via some digital medium other than print. And
even if it is print, the way the printing industry is going today a digital process is essential
anyway. We have to take the digital into account whether we like it or not. It does and
should intrude into our translation decisions. And that means – what?
Format challenges
Requesters mostly provide items to be translated in some simple format like Word (.doc
or .docx or .rtf) or .odt or similar, but not always. ‘Simple’ here is perhaps the wrong
word, because the document may not be simple to translate for a number of technical,
rather than linguistic reasons; it may be heavily formatted and have footnotes, for example.
Requesters may want a .ppt or .pptx translated. Or worse still, they may have a .pdf or
some other format we may not even have heard of. It could also be possible that we
are asked to translate a web page or some other presentation format of the kind. Or it
may be a translation for the Web done ‘inside’ the Web (as in the case of captions for
www.sdb.org, done from within a content management system (CMS) window.
As competent translators today, we cannot avoid speaking at least basic digitalese.
That means having sufficient understanding of what the different formats mean, even
just to advise the requester to “take it back please and do such-and-such with it, then
return it to me.” For example, the request to translate a pdf document will usually mean
asking the requester to resolve the problem of getting the document into some more easily
translatable format, advising him, if needs be, that the true purpose of PDF is that the
text or images NOT be tampered with. PDF was simply not intended to be translated,
transformed, transmogrified ...
No document is created in PDF in the first place. Every PDF has an underlying docu-
ment format — it can be created in Microsoft Word, Apple iWork, Adobe InDesign, Adobe
Framemaker, and indeed many other applications, including the Open Source set of pro-
grams. Therefore, if possible, ask your requester to send you the original document that
the PDF was created from. If you can get it, you save yourself a lot of trouble.
More complicated still can be a request to translate a text received in MS Word format
(.doc or .docx or even .rtf) with diagrams like organisational or flow charts. The people who
construct these inside such documents have little understanding of what can happen to
all the components of such diagrams when the document is opened in another computer!
Lines, boxes, arrows and text may simply not align in any sensible way if they have not
been appropriately ’locked’ into position. The only hope here is to encourage the requester
to send an image (jpg or other) and then we recreate that with appropriate chart software
where the text can be translated and inserted, or alternatively, translate the text separately
and leave it to the requester to sort out the graphics problem.
In the end, most of the formats indicated above are translatable and we may have to
just do our best. There is Google Translate, which offers the possibility of choosing a
document, including a pdf document. Or one can use Nitro or some other online free
service of the kind. Images with text may only permit us to translate the text separately.
Whatever we do may not be perfect and in some instances not even possible, but at least
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the attempt can be made.
The very best format to receive texts to translate from is the very last format people nor-
mally offer — plain, ordinary text without formatting of any kind. Then we can concentrate
on our task! Or can we?
The Web
Take the case of a document that is clearly intended for the Web. Let me suggest some
strategies that are peculiar to this situation:
• If it is a document adapted for the Web, it should have been given an appropriate
layout. If this is the case, then as translators we need to work with that layout. It
will usually have briefer paragraphs, many sub-headings, and the language will be
adapted to the broader expected readership. Now it frequently happens that ‘our
people’ do not think this way, have not adapted the text in any shape or form for Web
use. At the very least the competent translator might raise that question with them,
and then get on with the job! But if we think and know that a text is mainly or even
only for the Web, we should not hesitate to make some adjustments along these
lines as we translate.
• We at least need to be aware that in the Web context, word choice is important
for a number of reasons. This text will be searched, explicitly or implicitly. Search
will benefit from key words, synonyms. Some of that becomes a translator’s task,
especially because many of the search engines work best with English and we are
translating into English. Probably what we are saying here is that translation of texts
for the Web means that the function of the text takes some priority. And search is
definitely a function in this context. There are other functions that may occasionally
be necessary for us to take into account: metadata, key words and titles are all
important Web functions and have a bearing on the text we are translating, usually
indirectly, but occasionally directly.
• It can happen that the point just made has a further implication. We may be asked
to translate an Italian text that was originally written to persuade Italian readers or
listeners, but which is being provided by way of information for English readers. We
then have to make a decision — to retain the persuasive character of the text, which
puts us on our mettle to choose the right kind of English register and tone, word
choice etc., or in fact translate it as information, minus the persuasion, possibly
an easier task for us. You see, register can often be quite important as a choice,
persuasion or no persuasion. Italian may choose polite forms that we do not have in
English: tu versus Lei, for example, and our only way to convey Lei would be choice
of lexical items that raise the level of the discourse somewhat, since we have only
‘you’ to play with).
• Consider someone translating news for the day (e.g. ANS translations or local
Province news). Assume several news items, and maybe two or three captions
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for photos. There is more freedom in translation of these items than there would
be for documents of another kind. We are very definitely translating for (a) an in-
ternal readership and (b) for the world! It is important to adapt the news item to
a readership which is not in Italy and possibly not even connected directly with us.
We can assume the news editors have done their part and aimed for clarity, but we
have to go further than they can go, assuming the news in this case is in an Italian
original. ‘Our readership’, for the English-speaking world is a challenge in itself! We
have native speakers and English-as-another-language speakers to cater for. This
means attention to the terms we are using and just occasionally may mean adding
something in by way of explanation. This is so common that the European Union
Translation Commission has a name for it: ‘trediting’ (translator editing).
• Terminology will be more important for many items of Web translation, so we need to
have resources at hand for this, in order to be consistent in usage (remembering that
search engines can search across earlier translations too), correct too (obviously).
• For someone who regularly translates for www.sdb.org I can tell you that when it
comes to captions for photos, these are, even for technical reasons (space limitation
in the CMS) very succinct to the point of often being too succinct. I have no hesitation
in modifying content and style in this case. I may also know something of their
origins – that the captions may have come from fast-moving councillors whose native
language may not even be Italian; all the more reason to be careful and concise in
translation.
8.2 “The apple ate the boy” or, “Thank God for Google!”
Try the ordinary Google Translate with a sentence like La mela ha mangiato il ragzzo and
be prepared for a surprise! Google gets it right! You could also want a hippopotamus
for Christmas (but mix it around somewhat in Italian) and Father Christmas will bring you
one! So what is happening here? It is very important to understand this. We have to
thank a non-conformist Protestant Minister in Scotland in the 18th century for ‘getting it
right’ when he came up with a probability theorem that is almost impossible to explain in
simple language. His name was Thomas Bayes, and perhaps you have heard of Bayesian
theory. Google uses his theory as an algorithm for its translation.
Put as simply as possible it means that Google, which has scanned millions of books in
the world, can predict the probability of a certain sentence on the basis of what it already
knows. Every book (and importantly, every adjustment you make to a Google translation)
provides new information which adjusts that probability in your favour. Google makes all
of this very public, so if you go to https://books.google.com/ngrams you will be able
to try out ‘The boy ate the apple’ and ‘The apple ate the boy’ yourself. An n-gram, by
the way, is a combination of ‘n’ (= ‘number’ of) words, in this case a phrase or sentence
with 5 words in it. The probability of ‘The apple ate the boy’ in a published book for the
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past five hundred or so years is — you’ve got it — 0! So Google rearranges the sentence
(correctly). If you are after an e-model of language, then Google n-grams are the way to
go (especially trigrams, which they excel at). You cannot get any more ‘e-’ than this kind
of language model, because what you hear and read (or scan) is e-xactly what you get!
Actually, Google has begun to transform the question of online translation by making
it a mathematical and statistical issue. The new trick is to represent an entire language
using the relationship between its words. The set of all the relationships, the so-called
“language space”, can be thought of as a set of vectors that each point from one word to
another. And in recent years, linguists have discovered that it is possible to handle these
vectors mathematically. For example, the operation ‘king’ – ‘man’ + ‘woman’ results in a
vector that is similar to ‘queen’.
So the problem for the Google team is to find a way of accurately mapping one vector
space onto the other, given that different languages share many similarities in this vector
space. This approach by Google makes no assumptions about the languages, so we are
no longer relying on, say, the similarity between Spanish and Italian, or German and En-
glish. The mathematical approach could just as easily apply to English and Vietnamese.
For this they use a small bilingual dictionary compiled by human experts — comparing
the same corpus of words in two different languages gives them a ready-made linear
transformation that does the trick.
Having identified this mapping, it is then a simple matter to apply it to the bigger lan-
guage spaces. This approach is only at its starting point, but we are likely to see increasing
accuracy in Google online translation services.
8.2.1 Using digital aids
If we are living in a digital world, it only makes sense to let that world help us. Nobody,
or at least an infinitesimal few, would translate today with pen and paper. So we use a
computer, right? Then let the computer do what it does best!
Computers can compute and they can ‘remember’, so it would be silly not to take at
least these two capacities and use them to the fullest. Let me offer what I know and do,
and suggest you explore these options if you haven’t already. But one word of warning.
You can pay lots of money or you can pay nothing. If you have the option, which will you
choose? I choose the latter — always!
8.2.1.1 Addons
The first choice I make is not to use Microsoft Word. There is a deeper reason behind this
but it is not germane to the argument at the moment. The translator’s reason is that an
open source word processor offers free and open possibilities, some of which are useful
for translation. There is more than one open source word processor, but I use one called
LIBREOFFICE (almost but not quite identical to OPENOFFICE, which one could just as
easily use). The advantage of LO (or OO) is that it does exactly the same as Word, but
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more. It can open and ‘save as’ Word formats, or its native format (odt, odp, etc.), and it
can even open .pub (MS PUBLISHER). But importantly, it has a number of useful addons
or extensions which can assist the translator.
There are two of these that might be of interest. One simply splits the page into two
columns, nothing else, offering you the possibility of seeing our original on the left while
you translate into the right. This item as known as TRANSLATOR’S TABLE. It is minimally
useful in that it avoids the need to translate over the top of an existing text, which can be
a problem, especially if one forgets or is distracted during the process.
The second is known as ANAPHRASEUS a strange name for sure (the extension was
‘invented’ by a Russian). This is not the place to explain precisely how to make it work,
but it is not difficult, and the reward is exceptional. Anaphraseus is a CAT (Computer-
Aided Translation) tool for creating, managing and using bilingual Translation Memories
(TM). You add it into LibreOffice or OpenOffice, create a simple text file somewhere on
your computer, which functions as your TM, and Anaphraseus will segment your original
text, usually into paragraph lengths (which is even more useful than sentence units). The
advantage of a CAT tool along these lines is that you translate what you see in front of you,
what you have translated remains in permanent memory for instant recall should it appear
again, and when you have finished, you clear away all the paraphernalia that belongs to
the CAT tool (by pressing a ‘cleanup’ button) and the text is returned to you in its original
formatting but translated.
Translator’s Table, then, is the lowest level approach — it simply ensures that you see
the original all the time while you are translating.
Anaphraseus is a true CAT tool in that it creates a TM, segments your text and also
enables you to use a glossary if you so wish.
Is translation memory so useful? It depends how you consider it. The human capacity
for language is so flexible that you will rarely, and I mean rarely, come across perfectly
identical sentences, and TM requires absolutely identical sentences for complete drop-in
replacement. It can do ‘fuzzy’ replacement, but this can often be more time-consuming
than it is worth. But it is my experience that for certain genres, it is a godsend. Consider
homilies as a case in point. Over a period of time, if you are working with the same
homilist, he does not re-invent the wheel every year. He will use whole paragraphs at
times, unchanged, in a new context. TM comes into its own in this case. Or perhaps
something goes wrong with the email system, you send the homily off to its owner, but he
loses it, and you have cancelled his earlier email with the original attached. No problem.
Your translation is effectively still in the TM file, so once you receive the original text again,
it will all be translated as soon as you open it and call up Anaphraseus.
8.2.1.2 Standalone tools
Anaphraseus, by the way, is based on an excellent standalone tool known as WORD-
FAST, but Wordfast is a paid for program, and I said I would only deal with free ones!
Anaphraseus is effectively the ‘free’ derivation from Wordfast, though misses one function
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of Wordfast that a good personal friend of mine has turned into an art form. He trans-
lates from Italian to Portuguese, and given the similarity between these two Romance
languages, at both a lexical and syntactical level, he has been able to create glossaries
that mean that as soon as he opens a document in Wordfast, 90% of that document is
already translated by the glossaries — he only needs to make minor adjustments. The
fact that he needs to pay some C200-300 every two or three years to renew a licence is
outweighed by the sheer value of this function — for his situation. It would not work that
way for the IT-EN language pair, more’s the pity!
Fortunately, there is a free version of Wordfast called Wordfast Anywhere. Here is what
they themselves have to say about it:
Q: Do I need to pay?
A: No. It’s free, no strings attached, no covert scheme. No advertizing.
Q: What details must I provide to register?
A: Provide an email address, choose a password. We don’t want to know
anything else. No forms, no surveys, no credit cards.
Q: OK. That tool must be slow, inefficient, awkward ...
A: Nope. It’s just as good as all translation tools out there, and much better
in our view. Plus, there’s an option to tap into a huge reservoir of public-domain
translations (the VLTM).
Q: So, it’s a connected tool. What do I lose if there’s a connection loss?
A: At most, the one sentence you were translating. With an old-fashioned
translation tool installed in a local PC, if the PC breaks down, you can lose
everything at worse, hours of work at best. With Wordfast Anywhere, you’re
safe.
Q: What about confidentiality?
A: Your documents, TMs and glossaries are and remain confidential at all
times — period. They will never be disclosed to any third party. The optional
VLTM (a Very Large TM we created from public-domain data) is a give-only,
read-only project that strictly protects confidentiality.
Q: Some LSPs peddle a similar technology at harrowing costs ...
A. They prey on CTOs/CCOs that need a techno smokescreen at board
meetings to justify budgets.
Q: And ... again, sorry. Is this really free?
A: Yep. Ready?.. Click here to launch Wordfast Anywhere: http://www.
freetm.com/
There is another option, and it is called OMEGAT. OmegaT can be freely downloaded and
set up in your computer. It does effectively what Wordfast does minus the drop-in glossary
function. OmegaT will not work with .doc but it will work with .docx. So you have the option
of remaining with Word and saving files as docx instead of doc, or using LO or OO and
saving as odt. OmegaT will segment into sentences (and other units if you so choose),
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maintain a TM and is a very efficient translation tool for larger documents. I use it for major
documents of hundreds of pages. If the item to be translated is heavily formatted, with
images, footnotes, whatever, OmegaT simply ignores all this as far as you are concerned,
but does not ignore it in fact. When you complete your translation, working only with the
text it presents you with, all formatting, images and footnotes will appear correctly dealt
with at the end.
8.2.1.3 The cloud - back to Google
Everyone knows Google Translate (and Bing and Yahoo! versions too, perhaps, or Ba-
belFish) but how many realise that Google Translate offers much more for free if one has
a Gmail address?
At the bottom of the Google Translate page, there is Translator Toolkit. If you find any
of the above options too complicated for your needs or way of working, then consider this
option. It offers everything above plus machine translations (MT) based on the algorithm
already described earlier, and the further advantage is that if you adjust (and you can)
the machine version to what you know to be more correct or appropriate, this adjustment
goes into the Google ‘corpus’, which is about as close to unlimited as one could hope for
in this world. Translation Table (vertical split), Translation Memory, Machine Translation,
Glossaries (your own) are all available to you, and all for free.
It might sound as if we should all be in favour of Google Translate. For the benefits
outlined earlier, yes, but blind dependency on Google would be a foolish approach, for
99% of the time Google will not get it right, or not quite, and the ‘not quite’ can be a
disaster or at the very least an embarrassment. Translators will use it occasionally to
get the gist of something, especially if it is a passage from unfamiliar territory (context,
language ...) or to come up with some alternatives, since it suggests these with a simple
click on a word or phrase. It can save looking up a dictionary or dictionary of synonyms.
But that’s about the extent of it, other than the n-gram ‘possibilities in your favour’ or shared
work you may choose to do with the Translator’s Toolkit.
8.2.2 A possible digital workflow
Given all of the above, what kind of workflow might a translator choose? I can merely
indicate what I do. It may be useful to others.
Much depends, in the first instance, on the quantity involved in a text, and the degree
of formatting of that text. If it is a short text of anything between 1–6 pages or so, I would
often choose to use Anaphraseus (the addon to LibreOffice or OpenOffice) as a simple
Computer Assisted Tool (CAT). If it is a much more extensive text and certainly if it is a
heavily formatted one, footnotes and all, I would always use OmegaT as my CAT tool.
Assuming I have an internet connection, I will have the following tabs open in a browser:
• WordReference http://www.wordreference.com/iten/
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COMMENT: WordReference is particularly useful for those translating from a range of
European languages into English. It is kept up-to-date, and very often the forums explore
unusual or tricky cases.
• Google Translate: enough has been said about this already
• English Synonym Dictionary http://dico.isc.cnrs.fr/dico/en/search
COMMENT: this can be very useful for getting the translator out of certain ruts. If we always
translate certain words the same way, we begin to develop a hackneyed style that readers
will soon pick up on. See below for further comment on this.
• A style guide – one of your choice
There is one more important feature to the workflow – editing. And here the focus needs
to be on style (apart from typos and other simple errors). A good rule of thumb comes
from none other than George Orwell and can be especially appropriate when translating
from Italian to English, given a number of features we have already noted about Italian. Of
course, as translators we cannot apply all these rules every time if we are also to remain
faithful to our source text, but we may be able to find ways of reducing overall complexity.
George Orwell’s six elementary rules ("Politics and the English Language", 1946):
• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing
in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an
everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
8.2.3 Salesian Italian – a final comment
‘Salesian’ Italian has a relatively limited vocabulary, and this is not intended to be a nega-
tive comment; it would be typical of the in-language or argot of any organisation. A typical
official large text (e.g. the Youth Ministry Framework which runs to 200 plus A4 pages)
may not have more than 7-8 thousand word ‘types’ (a vocabulary concept, represented
by a ‘word’) with a relatively limited number of high-frequency nouns within this group. It
is not quite so easy to explain a ‘type’, but think of the letter ‘a’; there is but one letter ‘a’
and possibly hundreds of fonts which can represent it, as well as the upper, lower case or
italic, bold, underlined ... versions — ‘a’ is a type and its multitude of representations are
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called tokens. The YM Framework, for example, has 7,249 word types but 81,155 word
tokens (repeated instances of words or varieties of the same word-idea). Of course many
of these tokens are function words like il, di, e, la etc. which between them will account for
around 12,000 tokens, but we ought not be surprised that words like pastorale, giovani,
progetto, or proposta, formazione, animazione are high frequency types too. It is in some
of these cases that a wider range of synonyms can be helpful. I would not always trans-
late ‘proposta’ as ‘proposal’; sometimes it is better rendered as ‘invitation’ (e.g. as in a
‘proposta di fede’), and animazione can often be ‘leadership’. Likewise, popolare seems
to invite ‘popular’, but when a text is describing zone popolari it is more than likely talking
about working-class or poorer areas, and that is how it should be translated.
There is a tendency, in our texts, to employ the word ‘obiettivo’ more often than many of
its other synonyms (traguardo, scopo, meta, even bersaglio ...), but it would not be correct
to constantly translate this as ‘objective’. We need to have in mind the distinctions often
employed in the business world between the various terms which express the overall idea
of ‘objective’, something along the lines of the following:
OBJECTIVE — what you hope to achieve
AIM — what you intend to do to fulfill your objective
TARGET — a measurement of how successfully your aim is in reaching its objective.
GOAL — an indicator of whether your aim is achieving its objective.
Goals tend to be either achieved or not achieved — a near miss in soccer is still a miss.
Targets are more measurement-based. When you hit a target in archery you achieve
different scores depending on your accuracy.
So, using that analogy:
OBJECTIVE: To impress a damsel with your archery skills (overall mission)
AIM: To successfully shoot an apple off the head of a knave at an archery contest
attended by damsels (what you actually intend to do to support your mission)
TARGET: To hit the centre of the apple on the head of a knave (a measure of the degree
of success)
GOAL: To get your arrow in the apple without injuring the knave (a logical indicator of
success)
In Salesian terms, then:
OBJECTIVE: To keep the charism alive and relevant
AIMS: 1) To renew our active presence through Salesian assistance amongst young
people. 2.) To study the local youth context in the light of developments in society.
TARGET (for aim 1.): Each community and its work will explain Salesian assistance to
its lay mission partners
GOAL (for aim 2.): A study of the local youth situation will be carried out by the end of
the year.
We always aim to achieve our objectives. We can be close to our target, but being close
to a goal has the same effect as being a mile away.
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9 APPENDIX Translator’s style guide
Figure 9.1: Style guides
A work in continuous revision, broadly based on the EU guide for translators, but with
reference to other well-known style guides in the English-speaking world (CMS, MLA,
ITU, Liturgical press to name some). Online style guides of value are hard to come by
for free. One very good one, however, available free online is the Economist: http:
//www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction
Introduction
In this Guide, ‘style’ is synonymous with a set of accepted linguistic conventions; it there-
fore refers to recommended usage for Salesian translators, especially from Italian to En-
glish, not to literary style.
For reasons of stylistic consistency, the variety of English on which this Guide bases its
instructions and advice is standard British usage, which is also largely followed in Ireland,
South Africa, Australia. This is the author’s preference only. Reference is made to US
English alternatives in many cases. The important thing is to adopt one style and follow it
consistently.
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9 APPENDIX Translator’s style guide
9.1 General
9.1.1 Language usage.
The language used should be understandable to speakers of English across the Sale-
sian world where English is used. This may occasionally mean translator’s explanations
within square brackets if a word or a usage is clearly very localised and not generally
comprehensible. A considerable proportion of the target readership may be made up of
non-native speakers, so it is best to avoid colloquial usage where possible.
9.1.2 Quoting text.
When directly quoting a piece of text or citing the title of a document, the original style is
best reproduced rather than following the conventions set out below. However, it should
be clear we are quoting text by putting it in quotation marks or italics or setting it off in
some other way. If necessary, errors may be marked with ‘[sic]’ or by insert missing text in
square brackets.
9.2 Spelling
9.2.1 Conventions
9.2.1.1 British spelling
Even when following standard British usage, it is good to realise that influences are cross-
ing the Atlantic all the time (for example, the spellings program and disk have become
normal British usage in data processing, while sulfur has replaced sulphur in scientific
and technical usage). Note, however, that the names of bodies which follow US usage
may retain the original spellings, e.g. Don Bosco Center.
Spellcheckers can be set to the English one is most familiar with (UK, IE, AU, US...), as
an aid. In doubt, it is best to use a dictionary.
9.2.1.2 Words in -ise/-ize
Both spellings are correct in British English, but the -ise form is now much more common in
the media. Using the -ise spelling does away with the need to list the most common cases
where it must be used anyway. (There are up to 40 exceptions to the -ize convention: the
lists vary in length, few claiming to be exhaustive.)
The spelling organisation is thus appropriate. However, the spellings of bodies native
to the USA and other countries that use the –ize spelling may be retained.
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9.2.1.3 The -yse form
For such words as paralyse and analyse the -yse form is the only correct spelling in British
English.
9.2.1.4 Digraphs
Keep the digraph in aetiology, caesium, oenology, oestrogen, etc., not that these will turn
up very often! But note that a number of such words (e.g. medieval and fetus) are now
normally spelt without the digraph in British English. Foetus is still common in Britain in
non-technical use.
9.2.1.5 Double consonants.
In British usage (unlike US practice), a final -l is doubled after a short vowel on adding
-ing or -ed to verbs (sole exception: parallel, paralleled) and adding -er to make nouns
from verbs:
travel, travelling, travelled, traveller
level, levelling, levelled, leveller
Other consonants double only if the last syllable of the root verb is stressed or carries a
strong secondary stress:
admit, admitting, admitted
refer, referring, referred
format, formatting, formatted
but
benefit, benefiting, benefited
focus, focusing, focused
combat, combating, combated
target, targeting, targeted
Exception: a few verbs in -p (e.g. handicapped, kidnapped, worshipped, unlike devel-
oped ).
9.2.1.6 Carcass/carcase.
Prefer carcass(es) to carcase(s), except when citing official texts that use the latter.
9.2.1.7 Input/output.
Avoid the forms inputted and outputted; write input and output: e.g. 70,000 records were
input last month.
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9.2.1.8 -ct
Use -ct- not -x- in connection, reflection, etc. But note complexion and flexion.
9.2.1.9 Some weights
Write gram, kilogram (not gramme, kilogramme). However, use tonne not ton (‘ton’ refers
to the non-metric measure).
9.2.1.10 Some measures
Write metre for the unit of length, meter for measuring instrument.
9.2.1.11 A(n) historical.
The use of an rather than a before words such as historical or hotel dates back to a time
when the ‘h’ was never pronounced in these words. While we now write a hotel, an his-
torical event is still regarded as acceptable, presumably because the ‘h’ is still frequently
dropped in even careful speech, so choose which form you prefer.
9.2.1.12 Judgment.
Use the form without the -e- in the middle.
9.2.1.13 Tricky plurals.
Follow the list below.
addendum addenda
appendix appendices (books), appendixes (anatomy)
bacterium bacteria
bureau bureaux
consortium consortia
corrigendum corrigenda
criterion criteria
curriculum curricula
focus foci (mathematics, science) focuses (other contexts)
formula formulas (politics) formulae (science)
forum forums or fora
genus genera
index indexes (books), indices (science, economics)
maximum maxima (mathematics, science) maximums (other contexts)
medium mediums (life sciences, art), media (press, communications, IT)
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memorandum memorandums or memoranda
papyrus papyri or papyruses
phenomenon phenomena
plus pluses
premium premiums
referendum referendums or referenda
spectrum spectra (science), spectrums (politics)
symposium symposiums or symposia
vortex vortices
9.3 Interference effects
9.3.1 Noun/verb or noun/adjective confusion
Look out for errors involving the pairs below.
dependent (adj. or noun) dependant (noun only)
license (verb) licence (noun)
practise (verb) practice (noun)
principal (adj. or noun) principle (noun)
stationary (adj.) stationery (noun)
Note also:
all together (in a body), altogether (entirely);
premises (both buildings and propositions), premisses (propositions only);
discreet, discrete.
9.3.2 Confusion between English and Italian
Sufficient reference has been made to these throughout the text. Cf. chapter 4 in particu-
lar.
9.4 Capital letters
9.4.1 Capitalisation – general.
In English, proper names are capitalised but ordinary nouns are not. The titles and names
of persons, bodies, programmes, legal acts, documents, etc. are therefore normally capi-
talised:
Rector Major, the Vicar of the Rector Major, the Provincial etc.
the Constitutions and Regulations, Youth Ministry Department
NB: in English, unlike in some other languages, all the nouns and adjectives in names
take capitals.
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9.4.2 Long names
However, for long names that read more like a description than a real title use lower case:
Joint SF/EAO Regional consultative group to determine...
The general rule is ‘the longer the name, the fewer the capitals’.
9.4.3 Subsequent references to names.
If a body or person is subsequently mentioned in a text the name may be truncated pro-
vided it is clear what is meant, e.g.:
the Vicar [of the Rector Major]
Note, though, that the use of initial capitals has a highlighting effect, so if the body or
person is not particularly important in the context of the text, an ordinary noun phrase may
be more appropriate for subsequent mentions:
The consultative group focused on ...
9.4.4 Translations of names.
Use initial capitals for official or literal translations but lower case for descriptive transla-
tions:
The next General Chapter is the 27th general chapter in the history of the Congregation
9.4.5 State or state?
Use initial capitals for politically constituted states. Use lower case in most other instances:
state-owned, state aid, reasons of state, nation states, the Gulf States (defined group
of countries), the State (in theoretical texts)
9.4.6 Seasons, etc.
No capitals for spring, summer, autumn, winter ; capitals for weekdays, months and feast-
days (Ascension, pre-Christmas).
9.4.7 Events
Initial capitals throughout for events, e.g. the International Year of the Child. No capitals,
however, for the 2014-2020 six year period.
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9.4.8 Celestial bodies and objects
Since they are proper nouns, the names of planets, moons, stars and artificial satellites
are capitalised (Venus, Mars). However, the earth, the moon and the sun do not normally
take an initial capital unless they are specifically referred to as celestial bodies.
God created the Earth.
but
Don Bosco’s dreams covered the earth.
9.4.9 Generic terms
Proper nouns that have become generic terms no longer call for initial capitals. We thus
now refer to the internet and the web. The former is often found with an initial capital in
most Italian texts.
9.4.10 Proprietary names
Proprietary names (or trade names) are normally capitalised, unless they too have be-
come generic terms, such as aspirin, gramophone, nylon, celluloid. Thus, capitalise reg-
istered trade names such as Linux, Polaroid, Android.
9.4.11 Derivations from proper nouns
When proper nouns are used adjectivally they keep the initial capital (e.g. thus Salesian
as the adjectival form of the noun Salesian. However, while we usually capitalise Province,
it is not so common to capitalise provincial, understood as an adjective).
9.4.12 All capitals
Using all capitals for words in running text has the effect of emphasising them, often
excessively so, and is best avoided. Writing entire passages in block capitals has a similar
over-emphatic ‘telegram’ effect. Use bolding or other devices instead to convey emphasis.
9.4.13 Initial capitals in quotations
Start with a capital in running text only if the quotation is a complete sentence in itself:
Fr Vecchi once said ‘Let us begin from Don Bosco.’
Fr Vecchi also said “he went, facing the unknown and following the path marked out for
him by God.
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9.5 Geographical names
9.5.1 General.
Many place names have an anglicised form, but as people become more familiar with
these names in the language of the country concerned, so foreign spellings gain wider
currency in written English. As a rule of thumb, therefore, use the native form for geo-
graphical names (retaining any accents) except where an anglicised form is overwhelm-
ingly common.
9.5.2 Orthography.
Geographical names frequently contain pitfalls for the unwary, particularly in texts dealing
with current events. Check carefully that you have used the appropriate English form.
9.5.3 Names of regions
Regional names fall into two types.
• Salesian Administrative units. It is best to refer to the Salesian Year Book (Annuario)
for these, then translate them accordingly, retaining hyphens in the original, e.g.
East Asia-Oceania, but not Philippines-south, which should be Philippines South.
Salesian Termbase lists these in translation.
• Traditional geographical regions. Anglicise if the English has wide currency, e.g.
Catalonia. Otherwise retain original spelling and accents. It may be better to refer to
Catalan rather than Catalonian or Català (the local way of saying it) as the language
of that region, for example.
9.5.4 Rivers
Write Tiber for Tevere. The rule is as above for regions. Where there is a prominent
anglicised name, use that, otherwise use the local term.
If included at all, the word ‘river’ normally precedes the proper name (the River Thames),
unless it is regarded as an integral part of the name (the Yellow River). In either case, it
takes a capital letter.
9.5.5 Seas.
Anglicise seas (e.g. the Adriatic, the Pacific, the Atlantic).
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9.5.6 Lakes.
Use the English names e.g., Lake Genev a (for Lac Léman), Lake Maggiore (for Lago
Maggiore).
9.5.7 Strait/straits.
The singular is the form commonly used in official names, for example: Strait of Magellan.
9.5.8 Islands.
Islands are often administrative units in their own right, so leave in original spelling, except,
for example, in Europe for Sicily, Sardinia, the Canary Islands. Fortunately we no longer
have a presence in The Falklands, but if we do have to mention it (e.g. on a Salesian
map) then we need to be sensitive to our Argentinian confreres and put Las Malvinas in
brackets.
9.5.9 Mountains.
Anglicise the Alps, Apennines (one p), Dolomites, Pyrenees (no accents).
9.5.10 Valleys
Words for valley should be translated unless referring to an official region (or local pro-
duce): the Po valley, but Valle d’Aosta.
9.5.11 Cities
Same rule as for Regions, Rivers etc – if there is a well-known anglicised version, use it.
Turin rather than Torino, for example.
9.5.12 Non-literal geographical names.
Geographical names used in lexicalised compounds tend to be lowercased, as they are
no longer considered proper adjectives, e.g. roman numerals. The operative word here is
‘tend to’. Many would still write Roman numerals. Consult an up-to-date reliable dictionary
in cases of doubt.
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9.5.13 Compass points.
Points of the compass (north, north-west, etc.) and their derived forms (north-western,
etc.) are not capitalised unless they form part of a proper name (e.g. an administrative or
political unit or a distinct regional entity). Hence South Africa (country), but southern Africa
(in reference to the Vice Province which contains other independent nations). Compass
bearings are abbreviated without a point (54 °E).
9.5.14 Compound compass points.
Compound compass points are hyphenated (the North-East India); always abbreviate as
capitals without stops (NE India).
9.6 Hyphens and compound words
9.6.1 General
Compounds may be written as two or more separate words, with hyphen(s), or as a single
word. There is a tendency for compounds to develop into single words when they come
to be used more frequently: data base, data-base, database. You need to decide whether
or not, for your target audience, loving kindness or loving-kindness is more appropriate.
We are possibly not yet at the lovingkindness stage of development with this word.
Sometimes hyphens are absolutely necessary to clarify the sense:
re-cover — recover; re-creation — recreation; re-form — reform; re-count — recount
The following are examples of well-used hyphens:
user-friendly software; two-day meeting; four-month stay (but four months’ holiday );
9.6.2 Adverb-adjective modifiers
In adverb-adjective modifiers, there is no hyphen when the adverb ends in -ly :
occupationally exposed worker ; a beautifully phrased sentence
With other adverbs, however, a hyphen is usually required:
well-known problem; above-mentioned report; broad-based programme (but a broadly
based programme)
9.6.3 Adjective from noun
An adjective formed out of a noun and a participle should be hyphenated:
drug-related issues.
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9.6.4 Compounds
Many phrases are treated as compounds, and thus need a hyphen, only when used as
modifiers:
policy for the long term, but long-term effects.
9.6.5 Prefixes
Prefixes are usually hyphenated in recent or ad hoc coinages:
co-sponsor, ex-army, non-resident, pre-school, quasi-autonomous
If they are of Latin or Greek origin, however, they tend to drop the hyphen as they
become established:
codetermination, cooperation (and hence Cooperator ), subcommittee, subparagraph.
Co-responsibility should not normally be the translation of corresponsabilità, (it should be
shared responsibility ).
Others are more resistant to losing the hyphen:
end-user, end-phase, end-product, all-embracing, off-duty
but note
endgame, nonsense, overalls
9.6.6 Nouns from phrasal verbs
These are often hyphenated or written as single words. The situation is fluid: handout,
takeover, comeback but follow-up, run-up, spin-off.
9.6.7 Present participles of phrasal verbs
When used as attributes they are generally hyphenated:
cooling-off period
9.6.8 Avoiding double consonants and vowels
Hyphens are often used to avoid juxtaposing two consonants or two vowels:
anti-intellectual, part-time, re-election, re-entry, re-examine
However, the hyphen is often omitted in frequently used words:
bookkeeping, coeducation, cooperation, coordinate
9.6.9 Numbers and fractions
Numbers take hyphens when they are spelled out. Fractions take hyphens when used
attributively, but not when used as nouns:
twenty-eight, two-thirds completed
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BUT
an increase of two thirds
9.6.10 Prefixes before proper names
Prefixes before proper names are hyphenated: pro-American, mid-Atlantic, pan-African,
trans-European. Note, however, that transatlantic is written solid.
9.6.11 Coordination of compounds
Hyphenated compounds may be coordinated as follows:
gamma- and beta-emitters, acid- and heat-resistant, hot- and cold-rolled products
Where compounds are not hyphenated (closed compounds), or should you choose to
write them so, they are coordinated but written out in full:
minicomputers and microcomputers, agricultural inputs and outputs
NOT
mini- and microcomputers, agricultural in- and outputs
(BUT of course macro- and micro-structural changes)
9.7 Punctuation
9.7.1 General
The punctuation in an English text follows the rules and conventions for English, which
often differ from those applying to other languages. Note in particular that:
• punctuation marks in English are always — apart from dashes and ellipsis points —
closed up to the preceding word;
• stops (. ? ! : ;) are always followed by only a single (not a double) space;
• quotation marks may be either straight (‘...’) or preferably smart (‘...’), but not both in
the same text, and never chevrons (‹‹...››) or as in German („...“).
9.7.2 Full stop (period)
British English refers to a ’full stop’ whereas American English calls it a ’period’. Some
may also refer to it as a ’point’. No further full stop is required if a sentence ends with an
abbreviation that takes a point (e.g. ‘etc.’) or with a quotation complete in itself that ends
in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark before the final quotes:
René Descartes said ‘I think therefore I am.’
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9.7.2.1 Full stops as omission marks (aka ellipsis points).
Always use three points, preceded by a hard space. In Word, use Alt + Ctrl + (full stop)
to insert ellipsis points. Those who use Mac or Linux can find out how to do it in those
instances. The points are not enclosed in brackets:
‘The objectives of the Chapter shall be achieved ... while respecting the principle of
subsidiarity.’
If a sentence ends with an omission, no fourth full stop should be added. If any other
punctuation mark follows, there is no space before it.
NB: while in other languages omission marks are sometimes used to mean ‘etc.’, this is
not normal practice in English — put etc. instead.
9.7.3 Colon
Colons are most often used to indicate that an expansion, qualification or explanation is
about to follow (e.g. a list of items in running text). The part before the colon must be a
full sentence in its own right, but the second need not be.
Do not use colons at the end of headings.
Colons do not require the next word to start with a capital.
9.7.4 Semicolon
Use a semicolon rather than a comma to combine two sentences into one without a linking
conjunction:
The group dealing with the question of commas agreed on a final text; however, the
issue of semicolons was not considered.
Semicolons instead of commas can be used to separate items in a series, especially
phrases that themselves contain commas. But this is less the case than it is in Italian.
9.7.5 Comma
Items in a series. Here, the comma may be considered to stand for a missing ‘and’ or ‘or’.
Stan mowed the lawn, the bursar did the cooking and Frank looked after the garden.
He came, he saw, he conquered.
An additional comma may be inserted before the final ‘and’ (or ‘or’) if needed for em-
phasis or for clarification:
sugar, meat and rice, and whatever else you need for the week’s cooking needs.
A comma also comes before ‘etc.’ in a series:
sugar, meat, rice, etc.
but not if no series is involved:
They discussed kitchen needs etc., then moved on to other matters.
Commas also divide adjectives in series:
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genuine, stable candidates
but not if the adjectives do not form a series:
genuine Salesian vocations
In the second example, ‘genuine’ modifies ‘Salesian vocations’, i.e. the phrase cannot
be read as ‘genuine and Salesian vocations’.
9.7.5.1 Linked sentences
Use a comma to separate two sentences linked by a conjunction such as ‘but’, ‘yet’, ‘while’
or ‘so’ to form a single sentence:
The group dealing with the question of commas agreed on a final text, but the issue of
semicolons was not considered.
Where there is no conjunction, use a semicolon.
Note that if the subject of the second sentence is omitted, or if the conjunction is ‘and’
or ‘or’, the comma is not obligatory:
The group dealing with the question of commas agreed on a final text[,] but did not
consider the issue of semicolons.
The group dealing with the question of commas agreed on a final text[,] and the Council
approved it.
9.7.5.2 Parenthetic and introductory phrases
If a phrase is intended to complement or introduce the information in a sentence and has
a separate emphasis of its own, it is set off by a comma, or by a pair of commas if inside
the sentence:
Mindful of the need to resolve the issue, the House Council came to a conclusion.
The Council is partly decided by the community , as you know.
The Council, however, was of a different opinion.
Note that the sentence must remain a complete sentence even if the parenthetic or
introductory phrase is omitted.
Parenthetic phrases may also be created by setting off part of the sentence with a
comma (or commas) while retaining the normal word order. Both the following are possi-
ble:
He was a great man despite his flaws.
He was a great man, despite his flaws.
Without the comma, the phrase ‘despite his flaws’ forms part of the statement. With the
comma, the phrase complements it, i.e. the sentence retains its sense if the phrase is
omitted. The comma is therefore correctly left out in the following sentence:
Phrases must not be set off by commas if this changes the intended meaning of the
sentence.
However, a comma is required if the phrase has a separate emphasis simply by virtue
of being moved out of position, for example to the beginning of the sentence:
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If this changes the intended meaning of the sentence, phrases must not be set off by
commas.
Note, though, that short introductory phrases need not have any separate emphasis
of their own, i.e. they may be run into the rest of the sentence. Both the following are
possible:
In 2013, the Council took three decisions.
In 2013 the Council took three decisions.
Parenthetic phrases (but not introductory phrases) may sometimes be marked by dashes.
9.7.5.3 Non-defining relative clauses
Non-defining relative clauses are special cases of parenthetic phrases. Note the differ-
ence compared with relative clauses that define the preceding noun phrase (i.e. ‘the
translations’ or ‘the translation in the tray’ in the examples below):
The translations, which have been revised, can now be sent out.
(added detail — they have all been revised)
The translations which (or better: that) have been revised can now be sent out.
(defining the subset that is to be sent out — only those that have been revised are to be
sent out)
Note also that the use of ‘which’ in defining relative clauses is often considered to be
stilted and overly formal. ‘That’ reads more naturally. It also helps make the meaning
clearer, reinforcing the lack of commas, since it is used as a relative pronoun only in
defining clauses. Unlike ‘which’, however, ‘that’ needs to be close to the noun to which it
refers.
9.7.5.4 Combined uses of commas
The uses of commas described above can of course be combined. Worth noting is that
an initial comma is not needed before introductory phrases in linked sentences:
The Council agreed on a final text, but despite the importance of the matter, the other
important issue was not considered.
9.7.5.5 Avoiding commas
Avoid liberally sprinkling sentences with commas, but do so by constructing sentences so
as to minimise the number of commas required rather than by breaching the comma rules
described above. For example, inserted phrases can often be moved to the beginning of
the sentence. Parenthetic phrases can also be rendered with brackets or dashes. More-
over, a parenthetic phrase may not in fact be appropriate. Finally, a complex sentence can
be divided by a semicolon or even split into two or more sentences.
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9.7.6 Dashes
9.7.6.1 Dashes vs hyphens.
Most users of word processors do not distinguish between dashes and hyphens, using
hyphens to represent both short dashes (‘en’ dashes = –) and long dashes (‘em’ dashes
= —) commonly used in typeset documents. However, please note that both en and em
dashes are available in modern word processors.
9.7.6.2 Em dashes
Em dashes may be used to punctuate a sentence instead of commas or round brackets.
They increase the contrast or emphasis of the text thus set off. However, use no more
than one in a sentence, or — if used with inserted phrases — one set of paired dashes.
To avoid errors if your dashes subsequently turn into hyphens as a result of document
conversion, do not follow the typesetting practice of omitting the spaces around the em
dashes. In Microsoft Word, the keyboard shortcut for the em dash is Alt + Ctrl + - (on the
numeric keypad).
9.7.6.3 En dashes
En dashes are used to join coordinate or contrasting pairs (the Melbourne–Sydney route,
a the height–depth ratio). These are not subject to hyphen rules. In Microsoft Word, the
keyboard shortcut for the en dash is Ctrl + - (on the numeric keypad).
9.7.7 Brackets
9.7.7.1 Round brackets
Also known as parentheses, round brackets are used much like commas as indicated
above, except that the text they contain has a lower emphasis. They are often used to
expand on or explain the preceding item in the text:
CNOS-FAP (run by the Salesians in Italy) has centres in major cities.
9.7.7.2 Round brackets in citations
Use a pair of round brackets when citing numbered paragraphs from a formal document,
and close up to the article number:
Article 3(1), Article 3(1)(a), Article 3a(1), etc.
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9.7.7.3 Bracketed sentences
A whole sentence in brackets should have the final stop inside the closing bracket. Do not
forget the stop at the end of the preceding sentence as well.
9.7.7.4 Square brackets
Square brackets are used to make insertions in quoted material.
When translating, also use square brackets to insert translations or explanations after
names or titles left in the original language.
9.7.8 Question mark
9.7.8.1 Courtesy questions
No question mark is needed after a request or instruction put as a question for courtesy:
Would you please sign and return the attached form.
Do not use a question mark in indirect speech:
The Provincial asked when the deadline would be fixed.
9.7.9 Exclamation mark
In English, exclamation marks are used solely to mark exclamations, such as ‘How we
laughed!’ or ‘What a fiasco!’, or to add exclamatory force to a statement, e.g. ‘Two million
had to die!’, or a command, e.g. ‘Please read this paragraph!’ Exclamatory expressions
are appropriate in texts that directly address the reader or audience, such as speeches
or informal instructions, but are usually out of place in formal texts. Note that exclamation
marks are not used to mark the imperative as such in English.
9.7.10 Quotation marks
9.7.10.1 Double vs single quotation marks
Use single quotation marks to signal direct speech and verbatim quotes, and double quo-
tation marks for quotations within these. You may also use single quotation marks to
identify words and phrases that are not themselves quotes but to which you wish to draw
attention as lexical items.
9.7.10.2 Placing of quotation marks
Quotation marks at the end of a sentence normally precede the concluding full stop, ques-
tion mark or exclamation mark:
The Regional Superior indicates the importance of ‘a new, more vigorous campaign’.
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Has the Chapter published ‘A Province Strategy for Encouraging Vocations to the Sale-
sian Brother’?
However, if the quotation itself contains a concluding mark, no full stop is required after
the quotation mark.
Don Bosco said ‘At the age of nine I had a dream.’
This section is entitled ‘A new culture of vocations: What to do?’
9.7.10.3 Short quotations
Short quotes of up to four lines or thereabouts are normally run into the surrounding text.
They are set off by opening and closing quotation marks only.
9.7.10.4 Block quotations.
Extended (block) quotations should be indented and separated from the surrounding text
by paragraph spacing before and after. No quotation marks are required with this distinc-
tive layout.
9.7.10.5 English text in source documents
An English text quoted in a foreign language text keeps the quotation marks in the English
target text. But if a single English word or phrase is put in quotation marks simply to show
that it is a foreign element, the quotation marks should be removed.
9.7.10.6 Back-translating of quotes.
Avoid if possible. However, if you cannot find the original English version, turn the passage
into indirect speech without quotation marks. The same applies where the author has
applied quotation marks to a non-verbatim reference.
9.7.10.7 So-called
Quotation marks are preferable to so-called, which has pejorative connotations, to render
cosiddetto.
9.7.11 Apostrophe
9.7.11.1 Possessive of nouns
The possessive form of nouns is marked by an apostrophe followed by an -s. After the
plural ending ‘s’, however, the possessive -s is omitted:
the owner’s car
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women’s rights
footballers’ earnings
one month’s / four months’ holiday (but a one/four-month stay)
Note that the apostrophe is never used in possessive pronouns:
its (as distinct from it’s, i.e. ‘it is’), ours, theirs, yours
9.7.11.2 Nouns ending in -s
Nouns ending in -s including proper names and abbreviations, form their singular posses-
sive with -’s, just like nouns ending in other letters, but there are exceptions.
Jesus’ disciples (Jesus’s sounds awkard)
The -s after terminal s’ used to be omitted in written English, but this now tends to be
done only in classical and biblical names, e.g. Socrates’ philosophy, Xerxes’ fleet.
Note that some place names also omit the apostrophe (Kings Cross). Possessives of
proper names in titles (e.g. Chambers Dictionary) sometimes omit the apostrophe as well.
There is no apostrophe in Achilles tendon.
9.7.11.3 Contractions
Apostrophes are also used to indicate contractions, i.e. where one or more letters have
been omitted in a word or where two words have been joined together. Contractions are
common in informal texts, but not in formal texts. Examples:
don’t = do not
it’s = it is (as distinct from the possessive ‘its’)
who’s = who is (as distinct from whose)
you’re = you are (as distinct from your)
9.7.11.4 Plurals of abbreviations
Plurals of abbreviations (OPPs are requested of all Provinces) do not take an apostrophe.
9.7.11.5 Plurals of figures
Plurals of figures do not take an apostrophe:
Pilots of 747s undergo special training.
9.7.11.6 Plurals of single letters
The plurals of single lower-case letters may, however, take an apostrophe to avoid misun-
derstanding:
Dot your i’s.
Mind your p’s and q’s.
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9.8 Numbers
9.8.1 General.
In deciding whether to write numbers in words or figures, the first consideration should be
consistency within a passage. As a general rule write low numbers (up to nine inclusive) in
words and larger numbers (10 and above) in figures. If the passage contains both kinds,
however, use either figures or words for all the numbers.
Note that you should always use figures for statistics (3 new Council members were
appointed in 2002, 6 in 2006 and ...), for votes (12 were in favour, 7 against, and 6 ab-
stained), for ranges denoted by a dash and for serial numbers unless you are quoting a
source that does otherwise.
On the other hand, try not to start a sentence with a figure or a symbol followed by
a figure. Either write out in full or, if this does not work, make use of devices such as
inversion: Altogether 92 cases were found ..., Of the total, C 55 million was spent on ...
9.8.2 Figures and measurements
Always use figures with units of measurement that are denoted by symbols or abbrevia-
tions:
EUR 50 or fifty euros
250 kW or two hundred and fifty kilowatts
5 °C or five degrees Celsius
The converse does not hold. If the units of measurement are spelled out, the numbers
do not also have to be spelled out but may be written with figures: 250 kilowatts, 500
metres.
9.8.3 Hundreds and thousands
With hundred and thousand there is a choice of using figures or words:
300 or three hundred but not 3 hundred
EUR 3,000 or three thousand euros but not EUR 3 thousand
Million and billion, however, may be combined with figures:
2.5 million, 3 million, 31 billion
9.8.4 Writing out numbers
9.8.4.1 Single digit plus word
As a rule, avoid combining single-digit figures and words using hyphens (a 2-hour journey)
but write out instead:
a three-year period; a five-door car
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But note set phrases such as:
40-hour week, 24-hour clock
9.8.4.2 Adjacent numbers
When two numbers are adjacent, spell out one of them:
90 fifty-gram weights, seventy 25-cent stamps
9.8.4.3 Compound numbers
Compound numbers that are to be written out (e.g. in treaty texts) take a hyphen:
the thirty-first day of January, eighteen hundred and eighty-eight
9.8.4.4 Grouping of thousands
Do not use either commas or points but insert thin spaces (4 000 000). Note that serial
numbers are not grouped in thousands (p. 1452).
9.8.4.5 Billion
There is an increasing use of billion to designate thousand million (rather than million
million). Leading British newspapers and journals (such as the Financial Times and The
Economist) have also adopted the convention.
9.8.4.6 Abbreviating ‘million’ and ‘billion’
Do not use mio. The letters m and bn can be used for sums of money to avoid frequent
repetitions of million, billion; this applies particularly in tables where space is limited. The
abbreviation is preceded by a thin space (examples: C 230 000 m, $ 370 000 bn, £ 490 bn).
9.8.5 Fractions
9.8.5.1 Written out
Insert hyphens in fractions used as adverbs or adjectives but not if they are nouns:
a two-thirds increase, but an increase of two thirds
Avoid combining figures and words:
two-thirds completed, not 2/3 completed
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9.8.5.2 Decimal points
In English, the integral part of a number is separated from its fractional part by a point, not
a comma as in other European languages.
9.8.5.3 Statistics
Note when quoting statistics that 3.5 (as in 3.5 %) is not the same as 3.50 or 3½; each
decimal place, even if zero, adds to the precision. The non-decimal fraction is more ap-
proximate.
9.8.6 Ranges
9.8.6.1 Written out
When a range is written out, repeat symbols and multiples (i.e. thousand, million, etc.):
from $ 20 million to $ 30 million
between 10 °C and 70 °C
9.8.6.2 Abbreviated form
When a range is indicated by a dash (N.B. use an en-dash), do not repeat the symbol or
multiple if they do not change and close up the dash between the figures:
C 20–30 million, 10–70 °C
If the symbol or multiple changes, however, leave a blank space on either side of the
dash:
100 kW – 40 MW
9.8.7 Dates and times
9.8.7.1 Dates
Write out the month, preceded by a simple figure for the day, separated by a hard space,
e.g. 23 July 2007. Use all four digits when referring to specific years (i.e. 2007 not ’07).
However, in footnotes and where space is at a premium, the month can be written as a
number (e.g. 23.7.2007). When translating, just for information purposes, a document
following another convention, use your discretion but be consistent.
Note that in American usage, 23 July 2007 is 7.23.07 and in the international dating
system it is 2007-07-23.
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9.8.7.2 Avoiding redundancy
If the year in question is absolutely clear from the context, the year number may be left
out: on 23 July 2001, the Council adopted ... but subsequently on 2 August, it decided ...
9.8.7.3 Decades
When referring to decades write the 1990s (no apostrophe).
9.8.7.4 Systems of chronology
The letters AD come before the year number (AD 2000), whereas BC follows it (347 BC).
CE (Common Era), BCE (Before Common Era) and BP (Before Present) also follow
the year number.
9.8.7.5 Time spans
Use a closed-up en dash. For the second figure, best not to repeat the century if it is the
same, but you should always include the decade:
1939–45, 1990–96, 1996–2006, 2010–12
However, the century may be repeated in the first decade of a new century:
2000–2008
Note the following patterns:
from 1990 to 1995 (not: from 1990–95)
between 1990 and 1995 (not: between 1990–95)
1990 to 1995 inclusive (not: 1990–95 inclusive)
Note that 1990–91 is two years. Single school years, other kinds of years that run
through December, etc. so do not coincide with calendar years are denoted by a forward
slash: e.g. 1990/91, which is twelve months or less.
9.8.7.6 Time of day.
Europe prefers the 24-hour system in preference to the 12-hour system, in which case
we do not use a.m. and p.m. with the 24-hour system. Some other parts of the English-
speaking world prefer the 12 hour system. Make a choice and keep to it.
When writing times, use a colon in preference to a point between hours and minutes,
without adding hrs or o’clock: 11:30. However, if the original document uses a point, this
may be retained for the sake of convenience.
For midnight either write the word midnight or use 24:00 (for periods ending then) or
00:00 (for periods starting then).
For duration use h:
The time allowed for the test is 2½ h.
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Distinguish summertime (the season) from summer time, e.g. British Summer Time
(BST).
9.9 Abbreviations and symbols
9.9.1 Abbreviations
9.9.1.1 General
The prime consideration when using abbreviations should be to help the reader. First,
then, they should be easily understood. So when an abbreviation that may not be familiar
to readers first occurs, it is best to write out the full term followed by the abbreviation in
brackets:
The Educative and Pastoral plan (EPP) should enable the Province to respond to the
suggestions from Youth Ministry.
If your document contains a lot of abbreviations, consider including a list of them and
their meanings at the beginning or end of the document.
Secondly, they should not be used needlessly. If an abbreviation occurs only once or
twice, it is best to dispense with it altogether and use the full form. In repeated references,
it is also often possible to use a short form instead of an abbreviation:
The Educative and Pastoral Plan is now in place in every Province ... The Plan will
involve constant monitoring of and youth centre activities.
Lastly, an abbreviation in an original for translation should not be rendered by an impro-
vised one in English (e.g. repeated references to ‘POI’ in an Italian text should be spelled
out as ‘the Provincial strategic plan’ or just ‘the Plan’ rather than something like ‘OPP’,
especially since English-speaking Provinces now use a variety of local terms for this –
Strategic Plan, Overall Province Plan, etc.).
9.9.1.2 Definitions
Abbreviations in the broad sense can be classed into two main categories, each in turn
divided into two sub-categories:
Acronyms and initialisms
• Acronyms are words formed from the first (or first few) letters of a series of words,
and are pronounced as words (UNO for example). They never take points.
• Initialisms are formed from the initial letters of a series of words, usually written
without points, and each separate letter is pronounced (SUO and other Province
initialisms).
• Contractions and truncations.
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• Contractions omit the middle of a word (Fr, Dr, Sr) and, in British usage, are not
followed by a point.
• Truncations omit the end of a word (Feb., Tues. Bro.) and sometimes other letters
as well (cf.), and end in a point.
9.9.1.3 Writing acronyms.
Acronyms with five letters or less are uppercased:
THA, DG (= Direzione Generale)
Acronyms with six letters or more should normally be written with an initial capital fol-
lowed by lower case. Thus:
Cisbrasil, Asmoaf
Exceptions: organisations that themselves use upper case (such as UNESCO) and
other acronyms conventionally written in upper case (such as WYSIWYG). It could also
be that Salesian groups prefer uppercase, so ASMOAF (Australian Salesian Missions and
Overseas Aid Fund) may prefer ASMOAF!
Note, however, that some acronyms eventually become common nouns, losing even the
initial capital, e.g. laser, radar or sonar.
9.9.1.4 Writing initialisms
Initialisms are usually written in capitals, whatever their length, and take no points:
UNHCR, WTO, also AD for Anno Domini and NB for Nota Bene
If the full expressions are lower-case or mixed-case, however, the initialisms may follow
suit:
aka, PhD
Note that ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ are never capitalised (even at the beginning of footnotes) and
always take points.
9.9.1.5 Writing truncations
Truncations take a point at the end:
Jan., Sun., Co., fig., etc., cf., chap., dict., ibid.
Note also: St. (= Street; as distinguished from the contraction St = Saint) and p. = page
(plural: pp.); l. = line, (plural: ll.)
Note that any plural forms are regarded as truncations rather than contractions, so also
take a point:
chaps. 7 to 9, figs. 1 to 3
However, truncated forms used as codes or symbols, e.g. EN, kg, do not take points.
Further, no point is used after the v in the names of sporting contests (Savio v Rua).
The abbreviation No for ‘number’ (plural Nos) also has no final point, as it is in fact a
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contraction of the Latin numero. Having said this you find such a rule regularly ignored (or
people simply have no rule, so are not consistent).
Note that first names should be abbreviated with a single letter only, followed by a point
(Philip: P.). Multiple initials should normally be written with points and separated by a hard
space (J. S. Bach). For compound first names, use both initials (Jean-Marie: J.-M.).
As in the case of e.g. and i.e., some common truncations are traditionally never written
in upper case — even at the beginning of a footnote (c. [=circa], p., pp., l., ll. [= line/s]).
9.9.1.6 Plurals
Plurals of abbreviations are formed in the usual way by adding a lower-case ‘s’ without an
apostrophe:
PhDs, UFOs
While an abbreviation ending in ‘S’ should also take an ‘s’ for the plural form, e.g. SOSs,
this looks clumsy if it is often used in the plural.
9.9.1.7 Foreign-language abbreviations
Untranslated foreign-language abbreviations should retain the capitalisation conventions
of the original (e.g. GmbH).
9.9.1.8 Use of e.g. and i.e.
Use a comma, colon, or dash before e.g. and i.e., but no comma after them. If a footnote
begins with them, they nevertheless remain in lower case. If a list begins with e.g. do not
end it with etc.
9.9.1.9 Specific recommendations
Do not use the abbreviation viz., but use namely instead. The abbreviation cf., however,
is acceptable and need not be changed to see.
Article may be abbreviated to Art. in footnotes or tables, but this should be avoided in
running text.
9.10 Mathematical symbols
9.10.1 Foreign-language conventions.
Remember that languages may have different conventions as regards their use of mathe-
matical symbols, especially those for multiplication, division, and subtraction.
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Many mathematical symbols also have several different meanings according to the con-
text.
9.10.1.1 Multiplication sign
Change a point or a raised dot used as a multiplication sign to × or *, e.g. 2.6 . 1018
becomes 2.6 × 1018 or 2.6 * 1018.
Note, however, that a raised dot can have other meanings too.
9.10.1.2 Division sign
In the English-speaking world, the commonest symbols for division are ÷ , /. In other
countries : (colon) is very widely used to denote division.
Note that in Italy ÷ can also denote a range (e.g. 40 % ÷ 50 % means 40 to 50 per
cent).
9.10.1.3 Open dashes
Use a closed-up en dash, not a hyphen or open dash, to signify a range (e.g. 10–12 %).
Note the remark concerning Italian usage.
9.10.1.4 Technical tolerances
Do not use ± (ASCII 241) to mean ‘about’ or ‘approximately’. Use it only for technical
tolerances.
9.10.1.5 Per cent
Note that per cent is normally written as two words in British English. Use per cent where
the number is also spelled out in words: twenty per cent. With figures, use the per cent
sign (%) preceded by a thin space, e.g. 25 %.
Observe the distinction between per cent (or %) and percentage point(s): an increase
from 5 % to 7 % is an increase of two percentage points (or an increase of 40 %), not an
increase of 2 %.
9.10.1.6 Percentages
Express percentage relationships in running text economically, especially when translat-
ing.
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9.11 Scientific symbols and units of measurement
9.11.1 General
Most scientific symbols in current use are interlingual forms and do not require any adap-
tation when writing in English. In the specific case of weights and measures, the Inter-
national System of Units (SI — Système International) has now been adopted almost
universally.
9.11.2 Computing
Where computers are concerned, K (kilo), M (mega) and G (giga) often stand for bi-
nary thousands (1 024=210), millions (1 048 576=220) and billions (1 073 741 824=230),
respectively. Note the capital K in this usage.
9.12 Foreign imports
9.12.1 Foreign words and phrases in English text
Foreign words and phrases used in an English text should be italicised (no inverted com-
mas) and should have the appropriate accents, e.g. inter alia, raison d’être.
Exceptions: words and phrases now in common use and/or considered part of the
English language, e.g. role, ad hoc, per capita, per se, etc.
9.12.2 Personal names
Personal names should retain their original accents, e.g. Sándor, Potocˇnik.
9.12.3 Quotations
Place verbatim quotations in foreign languages in quotation marks without italicising the
text.
9.12.4 Latin
When faced with such phrases as a translator, check whether they have the same currency
and meaning when used in English.
The expression ‘per diem’ (‘daily allowance’) and many others have English equivalents,
which should be preferred e.g. ‘a year’ or ‘/year’ rather than ‘per annum’.
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9.12.5 Romanisation systems
9.12.5.1 Greek
Use the ELOT phonetic standard for transliteration, except where a classical rendering is
more familiar or appropriate in English.
9.12.5.2 Cyrillic
An internet search will normally reveal whether there is a more commonly used English
transliteration which is acceptable for particular proper names. For other languages, see
e.g. the Wikipedia entry on Cyrillic.
9.12.5.3 Arabic
There are many different transliteration systems, but an internet search will normally reveal
the most commonly used English spelling convention. When translating, do not always
rely on the form used in the source text.
9.12.5.4 Chinese
The pinyin romanisation system introduced by the People’s Republic in the 1950s has
now become the internationally accepted standard. Important new spellings to note are:
Beijing (Peking) Guangzhou (Canton) Nanjing (Nanking) Xinjiang (Sinkiang)
The spelling of Shanghai remains the same.
Add the old form in parentheses if you think it necessary.
9.13 Parts of speech
9.13.1 Adjectives and adverbs
9.13.1.1 Biannual/biennial
‘Biannual’ means twice a year and ‘biennial’ means every two years, but the terms are
often confused. If the meaning is not clear from the context, use alternatives such as
‘twice-yearly’ or ‘two-yearly’ or clarify what you mean, e.g. ‘the biannual/biennial report
(i.e. published every six months / two years)’.
9.13.1.2 here-/there- adverbs.
Herewith, thereto etc. are archaic or extremely formal variants of with this, to that, etc.
and should normally be avoided. If you feel you must use such forms, however, bear the
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following points in mind: here- adverbs should preferably be used only where they specif-
ically refer to ‘the present text’, as for example in hereto attached or herein described;
hereinafter is more precise than hereafter if what you mean is ‘from this point onwards
within this text’; therefor without a final ‘e’ is how you write ‘for that (purpose)’.
9.13.1.3 Singular or plural
Collective nouns
Use the singular when the emphasis is on the whole entity:
The Government is considering the matter.
The Council was not informed.
Use the plural when the emphasis is on the individual members:
The police have failed to trace the goods.
A majority of the Council were in favour.
9.13.1.4 Plural country names
Countries and organisations with a plural name take the singular:
The Netherlands is reconsidering its position.
The United Nations was unable to reach agreement.
Use a singular verb when a multiple subject clearly forms a whole:
Checking and stamping the forms is the job of the customs authorities.
9.13.1.5 Words in -ics
These are singular when used to denote a scientific discipline or body of knowledge (math-
ematics, statistics, economics) but plural in all other contexts.
Economics is commonly regarded as a soft science.
The economics of the new process were studied in depth.
9.13.1.6 A statistic
The singular statistic is a back-formation from the plural and means an individual item of
data from a set of statistics.
‘Data’ can be construed as either singular or plural.
The word none takes either a singular or plural verb, depending on sense.
Decimal fractions and zero. When referring to countable items, they take the plural:
Eritrean households have on average 0 / 0.5 / 1.0 (!) / 1.5 televisions (but 1 television)
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9.13.1.7 Present perfect/simple past
When writing from the standpoint of the present moment in time, the present perfect is
used to refer to events or situations in the period leading up to that time:
The Council is meeting to consider the proposal. It has (already) discussed this several
times in the past.
Where the starting point of this period is indicated, the present perfect is often used in
its continuous form to emphasise the ongoing nature of the process:
The Council is meeting to consider the proposal. It has been discussing this since 2001.
If the reference is not to a period up to the present but to a time that ended before the
present, the simple past is used:
The Council is meeting to consider the proposal. It discussed this last week.
9.13.1.8 Tenses in minutes
Minutes and summary records are written in the past tense in English, unlike in Italian and
some other languages, where they are written using the present tense.
This means converting actual or implied statements from the present to the past.
A simple example of English reported speech conventions:
German spokesman: ‘We are concerned at the number of exceptions which have been
included.’
Regional Superior: ‘Experts will be looking into this question.’
In reported speech, this becomes:
The German Province was concerned at the number of exceptions that had been in-
cluded. The Regional Superior said experts would be looking into the question.
9.13.1.9 Sequence of tenses
Simple past is normally replaced by past perfect (pluperfect):
Fr Pesantino said the tests had been a failure.
However, to avoid a clumsy string of past perfects in minutes where a speaker is re-
porting on another meeting or event, start with At that meeting or On that occasion and
continue with the simple past. Note that in order to maintain a logical sequence of tenses,
indications of time may have to be converted as well as verbs.
9.13.1.10 Streamlining
Lengthy passages of reported speech can be made more reader-friendly by avoiding un-
necessary repetition of ‘he said/explained/pointed out’, provided the argument is followed
through and it is clear from the context that the same speaker is continuing.
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9.13.1.11 Auxiliaries
The auxiliaries would, should, could, must, might are often unchanged, but sometimes
various transpositions are possible or required (e.g. must => had to; could => would be
able to; should => was to).
9.13.1.12 Split infinitive
This refers to the practice of inserting adverbs or other words before an infinitive but af-
ter the ‘to’ that usually introduces it, as in ‘to boldly go where no-one has gone before’.
Although there is nothing wrong with this practice from the standpoint of English gram-
mar, there are still many who think otherwise. One way of encouraging such readers to
concentrate on the content of your text rather than on the way you express it is to avoid
separating the ‘to’ from its following infinitive.
Note, however, that this does not justify qualifying the wrong verb, as in ‘we called on
her legally to condemn the practice’. In these and similar cases, either split the infinitive
with a clear conscience or move the qualifying adverb to the end of the phrase.
9.13.1.13 The gerund and the possessive
A gerund has the same form as a present participle, i.e. it is made up of a verb stem plus
-ing. Strictly speaking, it is a verb form used as a noun:
The Council objected to the Provincial’s prompt signing of the agreement (1)
The use of the possessive form (the President’s) follows the rule for nouns in general,
as in:
The Council objected to the Provincial’s prompt rejection of the agreement.
However, (1) could also be expressed as:
The Council objected to the Provincial promptly signing the agreement. (2)
Here, though, ‘signing’ is still clearly a verb and is not itself being used as a noun, as it
takes a direct object without ‘of’ and is modified by an adverb (promptly) not an adjective
(prompt). Accordingly, as ‘the Provincial’ is still the subject of a verb not a noun, there is
no reason for it to be in the possessive, despite what many authorities might say.
Note also the slight difference in nuance: the objection is to the Provincial’s action in
(1), but to an idea or possibility in (2). This explains why one could write ‘criticised’ in (1)
but not in (2), and why ‘does not foresee’ fits in (2) but not in (1).
Although the two constructions in (1) and (2) are therefore clearly distinct, the use of
personal pronouns poses a problem. ‘He’ would be the logical choice to replace ‘the
Provincial’ in (2), but unfortunately is no longer current English except in ‘absolute’ phrases
such as ‘he being the Provincial, we had to obey’. The solution is to use ‘him’ by analogy
with similar looking constructions such as ‘we saw him signing the agreement’ or to use
‘his’ by analogy with (1):
Parliament objected to him/his promptly signing the agreement.
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In such cases, however, the use of the possessive pronoun blurs the distinction be-
tween (1) and (2). This means that the latter form can turn up in contexts where it would
otherwise not occur:
Despite his promptly signing the agreement, ...
Bear in mind, though, that such constructions often look better rephrased:
Even though he promptly signed the agreement, ...
Despite promptly signing the agreement, he ....
9.14 Lists
9.14.1 Word processors can help
Use your word processor’s automatic numbering facilities wherever possible, since it is
much easier to amend a list if the numbers are automatically adjusted.
For the list items themselves, take care that each is a grammatically correct continuation
of the introduction to the list. Do not change syntactical horses in midstream, for example
by switching from noun to verb. Avoid running the sentence on after the list of points,
either by incorporating the final phrase in the introductory sentence or by starting a new
sentence.
When translating lists, always use the same type of numbering as in the original, e.g.
Arabic numerals, small letters, Roman numerals, etc. If the original has bullets or dashes,
use these. However, you need not use the same punctuation (points, brackets, etc.) for list
numbers, and indeed should not do so if they would otherwise look the same as numbered
headings elsewhere in the text.
The four basic types of list are illustrated below. In multi-level lists, follow the same rules
for each level.
9.14.2 Lists of short items (without main verbs)
List of short items should be introduced by a full sentence and have the following features:
• introductory colon
• no initial capitals
• no punctuation (very short items) or comma after each item
• a full stop at the end
9.14.3 Where each item completes the introductory sentence:
• begin with the introductory colon;
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• label each item with the appropriate bullet, number or letter;
• end each item with a semicolon;
• close with a full stop.
9.14.4 Complete statements
If all items are complete statements without a grammatical link to the introductory sen-
tence, proceed as follows:
1. introduce the list with a colon;
2. label each item with the appropriate bullet, number or letter;
3. start each item with a lowercase letter;
4. end each one with a semicolon;
5. put a full stop at the end.
9.14.5 Several sentences
If any one item consists of several complete sentences, announce the list with a complete
sentence and continue as indicated below:
1. Introduce the list with a colon.
2. Label each item with the appropriate bullet, number or letter.
3. Begin each item with a capital letter.
4. End each statement with a full stop. This allows several sentences to be included
under a single item without throwing punctuation into confusion.
9.15 Gender-neutral language
Using gender-neutral formulations is more than a matter of political correctness.
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9 APPENDIX Translator’s style guide
9.15.1 He/she
Avoid the clumsy he/she etc., except perhaps in non-running text such as application
forms. The best solution is often to use the plural, which in any case is more commonly
used in English for the generic form as it does not require the definite article. It is also
acceptable to use forms such as everyone has their own views on this (see usage note
for they in the Concise Oxford Dictionary).
In some texts, for example in manuals or sets of instructions, it is more natural in English
to address the reader directly using the second-person form or even the imperative:
You should first turn on your computer.
or
First turn on your computer.
instead of
The user should first turn on his/her computer.
9.15.2 Noun forms.
For certain occupations a substitute for a gender-specific term is now commonly used to
refer to persons working in those occupations, e.g. we now write firefighters instead of
firemen and police officer instead of policeman or policewoman.
9.16 Church and religious matters
9.16.1 The word ‘church’
Special consideration is given to the word “church” because of its frequent occurrence
and multiple uses.
Capitalise the word “church” when it refers to:
1. A specific denomination as a whole: Roman Catholic Church
2. As part of an official name or title: The Mass took place at St Mark’s Church.
Otherwise it can be lowercase:
1. The whole body of Christians, worldwide or throughout time: We pray that the church
throughout the world may be at peace.
2. Ecclesiastical, as opposed to secular, government: They felt that this violated the
separation of church and state.
3. The Christian faith: Some return to the church when they have children.
4. A building used for public worship: The church was built in 1912.
5. Religious service held in such a building: She attends church regularly.
6. A body of Christians constituting one congregation or parish: He has always been a
member of this church.
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9 APPENDIX Translator’s style guide
7. The body of Christians in any particular country, district, state, or city: Paul was eager
to visit the church at Ephesus.
9.16.2 God
Personal or relative pronouns referring to God are not capitalised unless they appear that
way in a quotation. Although referring to God as “he” or “him” or in other masculine terms
is objectionable to some, that is the present usage of most Bible translations and liturgical
books (e.g., Lectionary).
9.16.3 Titles of Persons
Avoid the overuse of titles. The first mention of a cleric or religious should use the full
name, preceded by Bishop, Abbot, Msgr., Dr., Rabbi, etc.
Bishop Joseph Cretin
Fr Peter Angel, SDB
Msgr. John McBride
In reference to the Holy Father, in the first mention use Pope Francis (note, not Francis
I). In later mentions, use Pope Francis or the pope. Lowercase pope or popes when used
in a general sense. throughout the centuries popes have stressed this theme. In reference
to clergy who have been established in the chapter, where no name is necessary, use the
title, in lowercase.
In his report to his priests, the bishop wrote: “I have some good news.”
9.16.4 Titles of Places and Structures
Such words as diocese, church, park, street, building, square, etc., are capitalised when
they are part of an official or formal name. When they stand alone, they are lowercase.
Diocese of St. Cloud but the diocese
Vatican library but the library St Michael’s Church
9.16.5 Citing Scripture References
Books of the Bible referred to in running text should always be spelled out, but all such
references in parentheses and notes should be abbreviated.
The words verse(s) and chapter (s) are likewise spelled out in running text but abbrevi-
ated (v., vv., chap., chaps.) in parentheses and notes.
Use hyphens between verses, en dashes between chapters.
The book of Genesis contains two accounts of creation.
For the J account of creation of the woman, see Genesis 2:18-25.
And the king gave Jehoiachin a daily allowance (2 Kgs 25:27-30).
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9 APPENDIX Translator’s style guide
The second is a series of stories about Ahab (chaps. 20–22).
For Scripture references use only Arabic numerals and follow the punctuation and spac-
ing noted below:
1 Cor 2:5 = a colon between chapter and verse with no space before or after the colon
Eph 2:5, 8, 10 = a comma and space between disconnected verses of the same chapter
Gen 3:1-4 = a hyphen between consecutive verses of the same chapter, no spacing
Exod 1:6–2:5 or, Psalms 1–9 = an en dash between consecutive material covering more
than one chapter or more than one psalm
Isa 2:5, 7; 4:8-9, 10 = a semicolon to separate disconnected chapters of the same book
Rom 8:28-29; Col 4:2 = a semicolon to separate references to two or more books of the
Bible
9.16.6 Citing Vatican Documents
The preferred translations for documents of the Second Vatican Council are Austin Flan-
nery’s: either Vatican Council II: Volume 1, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents or
Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (both published by Costello Publishing
Co.).
As with citations from Scripture, do not footnote references to Vatican documents—except
at the first reference in order to properly credit the version you cite. Use the following for-
mat for in-text citations: Spell out the reference in running text: Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church). Abbreviate in parenthetical citations. Do not use either “no.”
or §. Do not italicize abbreviation. Do not insert a comma between the document and
number: (LG 6).
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Index
,Anaphraseus, 81
équipe, 52
abbreviations, 33
accents, 33
accompagnamento, 28
acronym, 36, 44
ad gentes, 29
ambiente, 51, 63
ambiente educativo, 51
ambienti popolari, 63
anche, 52
Andrew Walls, 13
animation, 30, 32
animazione, 30, 69, 85
ANS, 27, 37, 44, 47
assistenza, 69
assistere, 49
attualmente, 49
autogrill, 53
autostop, 53
baldo, 50
Bellos, 16
Borges, 16
box lock-up, 53
Braido, 70, 75
bravo, 50
British spelling, 63
buon cristiano e onesto cittadino, 29
buonanotte, 46
C. 118, 63
C. 17, 64
C. 187, 65
C. 2, 64
C. 26, 64
C. 29, 63
C. 33, 62
C. 36, 64
C. 55, 64
C. 7, 63
C. 88, 64
caldo, 50
calque, 65
cammino, 28
camping, 53
Canterbury Tales, 8, 10
Capitalisation, 65
capitalisation, 37, 66
carta, 51
casino, 53
CAT tool, 81
Centro Formazione Professionale, 17
Cervantes, 10
ceti popolari, 63
charism, 62
Chaucer, 8, 10, 11
che, 52
chevron, 38
Cicero, 12
classifiers, 64
coerenza, 51
coherence, 42
cohesion, 15, 66
collaboratore, 51
collegio, 51, 73
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colloquio, 51
colon, 37
colonia, 51
come, 52
come vuoi, 23
Communio et Progressio, 12
compagno, 51
condizione, 51
conferenza, 49
confetti, 53
connectives, 25
conoscere, 49
constitutions, 61
controllo, 49
Corinthians, 10
corpus, 70
country names, 33
cronaca, 47
culture, 68
dancing, 53
department, 65
depliant, 52
di niente, 24
diacritics, 33
dialect, 42
dicastero, 55, 65
digital, 76
digitalese, 76
discourse, 15, 24, 62, 70, 75
Disegno, 66
docile, 51, 66
dolce, 23
Donne, 12
Eco, 41
economo, 21, 51
edito, 50
editore, 51
education, 17
educator, 17
ellipsis, 37
Index
em dash, 37
emarginati, 51
English, 65
enunciato, 61
equamente, 50
esaltato, 50
esercizi spirituali, 51
eskimo, 53
eventuale, 49
eventualmente, 50
exhortation, 61
faida, 54
false cognate, 22, 49
false friend, 33
false friends, 55
fare notizia, 48
fatalmente, 50
Fawlty Towers, 60
fiasco, 54
fisionomia, 51
flipper, 53
footing, 53
formazione, 17, 51
fragilità, 51
Frost, 40
gadget, 53
GC26, 66
geniale, 33, 51
genre, 69
gerund, 59
giaculatoria, 51
giovani, 63
gioventù, 63
given, 57
glass, 11
globale, 51
glorious, 8, 11, 13, 15
gloss, 9, 10
golf jumper, 53
grammar, 22
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grammatical, 15
graphic, 15, 62
habitat, 35
hagiography, 70
Harry Potter, 49
homilies, 81
hyperbole, 72
iconographic discourse, 71
imago, 71
in effetti, 24
incaricato, 51
Incarnation, 13
incontro, 32
inculturation, 14
individioso, 50
infatti, 24, 49
insigne, 48
integrale, 30, 51
inter-cultural, 15
interessare, 51
interpres, 12
interpretation, 62, 64
intertextual, 15
inutile, 23
irrinunciabile, 51
Istituto, 20
Italian verse, 39
itinerario, 28, 33, 51
IUS, 44
jargon, 54
Keneally, 41
La Repubblica, 26
La Stampa, 27
Lammin Sanneh, 13
Lectio Divina, 64
Lenti, 64
lettorato, 51
lettura, 49
Index
lexical, 62
lexical bundle, 46
lexical bundles, 47
lexical density, 60
lexis, 15
LibreOffice, 80
libreria, 49
liminalità, 51
linguaggio, 51
Lists, 40
littera, 71
liturgical texts, 69, 70
loss, 15, 16
machine translation, 83
maestro, 54
Manutius, 37
martyrdom, 70
memoirs, 70
Memorie Biografiche, 28
men, 67
metaphor, 11, 15, 40
metaphors, 10
ministry, 13, 15, 65
mismatch, 69
mission, 13
missionario, 32, 51
missionary, 14
Missions, 13
mistica, 16
molto, 52
Monsignore, 51
mood, 61
morbido, 49, 50
moroso, 50
morto, 52
MS Publisher, 81
MS Word, 80
narratives, 70
Nida, 11
nipote, 44
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nominalisation, 59
non-defining relative clause, 32
non-finite, 59
notes, 53
notizie, 43
Notte bianca, 46
numbers, 33
numerals, 36
obbligo scolastico, 20
occasionalmente, 50
odp, 81
odt, 77, 81
OmegaT, 82
open source, 80
OpenOffice, 80
operativo, 51
orfano, 51
organico, 29, 51
organismi, 51
orizzonte, 24
parificato, 20
parking, 53
parola all’orecchio, 29
Parseltongue, 16
passività, 51
pastorale, 22, 51
Pastorale Giovanile, 65
paternità, 51
patrimonio, 51
pdf, 77
pedagogia, 51
per tali motivi, 25
perché, 52
percorso, 28
permanente, 66
persone, 23
phonic, 15, 62
phrase pattern, 47
più o meno, 25
Piedmontese, 73, 74
Index
pietà, 51
Pius XI, 71
plaid, 53
plural, 38
poem, 42
ponte, 53
poor, poorer, poorest, 63
Pope Francis, 26
popolare, 63
POS, 55
possibilmente, 50
ppt, pptx, 77
pragmatic, 62
presbiterio, 52
prescriptive texts, 61
presentemente, 50
Presidente del Consiglio, 48
presidenza, 52
prete, 44
Preventive System, 75
preventività, 52
priestly, 15
priestly task, 8
procura, 52
professionale, 52
profetico, 52
Progetto, 66
progetto, 52
programmatic texts, 61
promozione, 30, 52
proposta, 85
proprio, 32
prosodic, 15, 62
protocollo, 52
punctuation, 35
quà e là, 25
quantifiers, 64
R. 1, 63
R. 16, 63
R. 187, 65
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Index
R. 4, 63
radiografia, 52
readership, 79
realtà, 23
Rector Major, 22
register, 42, 49, 78
regolamento, 52
regulations, 61
religious, 10
reliquaire, 49
Responsabile maggiore, 22, 52
Rettor maggiore, 22
rettorato, 52
ricca, 29
ricoverato, 52
rilanciare, 52
rilevante, 50
rtf, 77
sacerdote, 44
Salesian, 8, 9, 13, 15, 31
Salesian Constitutions and Regulations,
61
Salesian tradition, 46
Salesian translator, 39, 54
santuario, 52
scarsamente, 50
sciogliere i nodi, 27
sciupata, 54
scusa, 52
secondo me, 49
sector, 56, 65
semantic, 55, 62
semantic density, 60
semicolon, 37
sensibile, 50
sensible, 49
sensum, 30
sentential, 15
sermones, 72
servizievole, 50
sessennio, 52
sessennium, 32
settore, 55, 65
Severino, 72
simpatico, 49, 50
sinergia, 52
situazione, 23
slip, 53
slow, 53
smoking, 53
sociolect, 42
solennità, 46
sounds and symbols, 38
specialmente, 50
spider, 53
spot, 53
SSCS, 12
St Jerome, 11
St Josaphat, 70
stage, 52, 53
starter, 53
stasis’, 72
stato ecclesiastico, 44
stock phrases, 22, 24
Strenna, 57
studiare, 74
Style Guide, 38
subjunctive, 61
suggestivamente, 23
SVO, 48
syntactic, 62
tappa, 28
teca, 47
tense, 22
Termbase, 54
terminological issues, 65
Terminology, 79
terminology, 54
territorio, 52
theme, 57, 59
thesis statement, 61
tight, 53
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tilt, 53
TM, 81
toast, 53
tradurre, 12
translate, 12
Translation, 28
translation, 9, 10, 13, 15, 62, 69
translation memory, 81
translator, 10, 40, 49, 54, 73
translator as communicator, 12
translator as conqueror, 12
Translator Toolkit, 83
Translator’s Table, 81
translators, 15
trediting, 79
tremendo, 50
triviale, 50
troppo, 52
ultimamente, 50
Umberto Eco, 40, 48
Universalis, 71
untranslatability, 28
uomini, 26
urna, 47
Vatican, 16
vendetta, 54
verbum, 30
vicario, 52
visione, 29
Vocational Training Centre, 17
vocazionale, 17
volentoroso, 50
volitional texts, 61
volontariato, 52
Web, 76
word choice, 22
word processor, 80
word tokens, 85
word types, 84
Wordfast, 81
Index
Youth Apostolate, 65
Youth Ministry, 65
ZENIT, 45
128