3341 A Glorious Thing The translator's priestly task
austraLasia #3341
A Glorious Thing
The translator's priestly task
MELBOURNE 3
January
2013
-- Consider,
for a moment:
'Non
capovolgere' - Do not turn over??
Dear
God, will this sentence never end? ... A delicate world
of punctuation
lives just beneath the surface of your work and the
semicolon is one to
watch out for!
Getting
to grips with education: formazione professionale,
educatore ...
We can
have many kinds of friends in Italian ... but beware of
falsi amici (false
friends)!
When the
notizie are not the news
'Genreflections'
- hagiography and other genres of holiness.
Do
any of these ring a bell, or arouse curoisity? Then A Glorious Thing may be
worth your while skimming through.
'This end up!' was a
serious temptation as a title for a work dealing with 'getting
it
right' in the translation game, but in the end one has to
write what
one believes to be true, and this writer believes that
translation is a
glorious task! It is not a view that everyone shares, so here
is yet
another reason for skimming through the pages until you light
upon
something that strikes home. And something will, that's for
sure.
This is a serious work, not without its humour, for
translation readily
lends itself to this - unwittingly sometimes, embarrassingly
at other
times. Italian-English may be more prone to 'false friends'
than almost
any other language pair you can think of. 'Autostop' is simply
hitch-hiking; men can wear 'slips' believe it or not; Italians
don't
lose their footing - they go 'footing'; you don't throw
Italian
'confetti' around, you eat them; and - beware 'casinos'!
But
it does get really serious when it comes to how we handle our
charism
in translation, for this touches us at the core of our
Salesian being,
obviously. Consider the following:
The dense
formulations of volitional texts (Strenna) or programmatic
texts
(Chapter theme) 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
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
translations 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.
The essay (it is Chapter 6 in fact of a 9 Chapter work) then
goes on to
look closely at any number of articles of the Constitutions
and
Regulations that are crying out for revision. It also tackles
the
challenge of Strenna and Chapter statements. These are issues
probably
not listed anywhere in GC27 tasks - but one hopes that they
will be
listed at some stage either during or after, or we are in a
certain
amount of trouble!
The book is serious too in its first chapter - skip that if
you are not
interested in the theory. Don't worry, it soon gets down to
practice.
We have itinerari, cammini,
percorsi galore and endless accompagnamento to say
nothing of animzaione,
but most of these terms can lead the English-speaking reader
up the garden path unless we are careful. In fact itinerario and its
synonyms is an emerging metaphor set in Salesian language.
For
a lighter view of things, consider how Ernest Hemingway
exploited Italo-English in his Farewell to Arms. There is much we Salesians
can learn from it. Chapter 2, 'Glory with guts', will let you
in on a few secrets of that kind.
Did you know that if you put la mela ha mangiato il ragazzo
into Google Translate, it will give you the correct English
translation? Is Google that smart? In fact it is, or rather,
the whole
question of online translation is going through a paradigm
change and
it can only get better. But beware, just the same! Nobody or
almost
nobody today would translate with pen and paper. We can use
digital
aids to do what they can do best and make our task easier.
Read Chapter
8, Digital-e(a)se.
The work concludes with a 'Translators Style
Guide' that should be of help to anybody who even casually
needs to
translate something or tidy up a translation, and there is
also an
extensive index if you need to look up a term.
In the end A Glorious Thing
takes the view that the task of the Salesian translator is
about
'priestly, tireless dedication to getting it right', a divine
mission.
A Glorious Thing is
available in PDF. It is 130 pages and about 2.6 Mb.
http://sdl.sdb.org/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-0english-italian%2cportugues%2cespanol%2cenglish-01-2----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-1l--10-EN-50---20-about---00-3-1-00-0--4--0--0-0-01-10-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=english&cl=CL4.11.3
