Japanese biblicist and Salesian priest returns to the House of the Father

TOKYO: 17th April '04 – Fr. Kosuke (Joseph) Ishikawa of the Japanese Province, passed to his eternal reward on Thursday morning 15th April after a lifetime dedicated to education and especially to the Word of God. Fr. Ishikawa was, until his recent long illness, a regular feature at Biblical seminars and congresses held in Tokyo where the Jesuit Sophia University, the Franciscan and Diocesan seminaries are to be found. He was also a prominent member of the team which has worked on the official translation of the Bible into Japanese.

Fr. Ishikawa was born in Tokyo and baptised in his teenage years while he attended the Salesian school at Kodaira. From there he joined the aspirantate at Miyazaki and continued on with his initial formation at Chofu. Brilliant and known for his skill in Latin and Italian, he was often called upon by Italian missionaries from Saturday farm work to help them translate their Sunday homilies. Fr. Ishikawa studied in Rome at both the PAS (later the UPS) and the Biblicum.

Don Bosco's spirit top of the chart: language science reveals 'our' language

ROME: 16th October '04 – Don Bosco's spirit. In the course of the past century, the most frequent phrase to cross Salesian lips! Closely followed by Don Bosco's charism, Salesians of Don Bosco, love of God for the young, our rule of life, project of life.

All natural human languages have a distinctive feature - words 'keep company' with other words. If we have a representative set of texts belonging to a language, it is possible, with the right software, to identify precisely which words keep company with which other words. These clusters often comprise three words and as many as five or six. Beyond that number, clusters are not well-defined. In almost every case, a defined cluster would have an invariable meaning in any context.

It does not take much to realise that these facts could be of inestimable value for several purposes: (1) given the right conditions, a translator can use one or two actions to replace a string containing anything up to 50 key strokes depending on the size of the words involved; (2) the most frequent clusters in the entire corpus will almost certainly identify the most important topics, in terms of regular use, for that language.

Without arguing the point about it too much, Salesian 'talk' can be regarded as a language. It has a range of some 600-700 distinctive terms (isolated thus far) and hence also a range of combinations or clusters of those terms with other words or amongst each other. A glossary of approximately 100 of the most frequent Salesian clusters now exists and is available for anyone who would like it. As with glosdben (which is mostly but not entirely single words) it is arranged alphabetically, not in order of importance.

All clusters listed have appeared in at least 80% of the total corpus of 227 official Salesian texts beginning from Don Bosco himself. Each cluster contains a word that has appeared at least 1,800 times in that corpus and as often as 9,000 times. Each cluster has appeared a minimum of 10 times and as often as 221 times in that corpus. Clusdben, as it is termed, is of interest partly because it is not random, and represents the kind of company Salesian terms keep and have kept over 150 years. It can be downloaded quickly from www.sdb.org reserved area | file sharing. If people were seriously interested in letting it work automatically within MSWord for translation purposes, then they need only do two things: (1) strip the table format back to simple tab-separated format and save the entire file as *.txt (all that can be done within Word, Tables). (2) download Wordfast for free from www.wordfast.net and follow directions for installing it and using it, along with the handy manual that can be downloaded. It will make automatic use of your clusdben.txt. Wordfast can be used free for jobs up to 500 translation units (usually a TU is a sentence worth) which would do most people.

A handy glossary - and practice at using the Reserved Area of the SDB Website

ROME: 15th October '04 – As the Rector Major has been travelling for the past 24 hours to reach Australia, and after a few hours of rest has now joined the Provincial Council for its regular monthly meeting, there is little to report at present. Tomorrow he takes part in the Rectors' meeting where he will offer his thoughts on topics such as experience of God and the Salesian vocation, spirituality and holiness.

In the meantime, here is an opportunity to offer something that may prove to be very handy for the reader - a simple two-column glossary of Salesian words and phrases (Italian-English) that you can consult. While it is obviously useful for anyone doing translation, it may be of use for any Salesian who wants to check the meaning of a term that is in common Salesian use. It could be helpful for novices or postnovices in their Salesian Studies courses. It is one of the practical products stemming from the development of Lexisdb.

The glossary is a Word document, entitled glosdben.doc (glossary sdb English). Here is your chance, if you have not already made use of it, to go into the Reserved Area of the site, where a space is available to all Salesians for file sharing. If you have not as yet registered with the site, do so (follow directions on the Home Page of www.sdb.org ) - it will not take you long, and the response will be quick. Once registered, simply enter the reserved area, file sharing and download the file which will be immediately apparent to you.

Once you have your copy of glosdben, it's there to use as you wish. If you are looking for a term and do not find it there, please advise. The file will be updated whenever additions are made.

Availability of English language Salesian literature

ROME: 24th October '04 – In recent comments (cf. aLa #918) the Rector Major, responding to questions asked of him by confreres, has indicated that there should be much sharing of existing English translations of Salesian texts. The General Council has already made a decision that some major texts which currently exist only in Italian, should be translated into the major languages of the Congregation. These latter texts include such weighty tomes as Braido's recent two volume study of Don Bosco, (prete dei giovani nel secolo della libertà). Translations of this magnitude will take time.

In the meantime, austraLasia would like to draw your attention to texts that are available on Bosconet (www.bosconet.aust.com) and which can serve particularly well either for general reading or for use in a formation setting.

(1) A General Bibliography on Don Bosco - this is a list of all known translations in English either of primary works by Don Bosco or writings about him: some of these are no longer in print of course, but the list is a useful guide. It does NOT contain actual texts, just reference to titles and where these should be obtainable if in fact they are still so.

(2) A bibliography of all known printed Salesian literature in English. This was compiled only recently so should be pretty much up-to-date. If you can add to it let us know. It indicates where the material should be available and in many cases how much it would cost.

(2) Excerpts from the Memoirs of the Oratory. These are all taken from the 'New Rochelle' translation of MO, the only existing translation in English and now unfortunately out of print. There are a dozen or more selections in this file, mainly from Part I and some from Part II of MO. They cover the better known events in that book and are certainly useful for private reading as well as for formational use. Page references are given.

(3) Translations by Fr Alan McDonald (AUL). There are 4 zip files in all, each containing a dozen or so texts, so quite a mine of information here. There's bits and pieces of everything but almost none of these texts have ever been in English before. They are well translated by a man who spent quite some years working in Rome at this and other tasks. It is mostly 'secondary' material rather than primary sources, though some of the latter are there too.

(4) Translations by Fr Zuliani (SUE). The first of these is now available on Bosconet - 9 Good Nights by Fr Ricceri. If people find this useful and would like more of Z's work it might be well to let us know, since there is some work involved in getting them into digital form. The translations are readable but not perfect; the scanning has actually picked up a number of original errors and corrected them! But there are occasional layout problems and problems with style. Nevertheless, the entire text is there and can be dealt with in various ways once downloaded.

(5) One English Salesian Publishing House has just gone online, Don Bosco Publications UK http://www.don-bosco-publications.co.uk It does not publish primary texts, but some of the general Salesian literature there may be of interest.

Finally - if individual readers of austraLasia have an interest in particular texts and wonder if they are already in English, write and ask; they may well be, or we may be able to get a digital version to you. There is no harm in asking!

The Salesian Brother: DB, Vespignani, Rinaldi - Fr Zuliani's translations available

ROME: 26th October '04 – Five MSWord files make up a collection of translated materials by Fr Zuliani (SUE) on the Salesian Brother, now downloadable from Bosconet www.bosconet.aust.com. They deserve brief comment:

(1)The five files comprise (and are best read in this order): Fr Rinaldi's Circular Letter on the Brother, published 1925, but written before that date - an explanation as to why prefaces the Letter; Remarks by Fr Vespignani on the identity of the Salesian Brother; Don Bosco's talk to the Brother novices at San Benigno Canavese 1883; Fr Vespignani's lengthy, two part commentary on Don Bosco's talk - these are two separate files. All files are prefixed with Z.

(2) The translation originals were in photocopied form - this has not caused any particular difficulty for scanning, but the originals have clearly not been proofread. The scanner has in fact picked up many obvious typographical errors and corrected them. It will not have recognised all of them. 'Boso' has been returned to 'Bosco' where possible and if you meet any Lemony's they are supposed to be Lemoyne!

(3) I have respected the fact that these are an individual's translation, despite some reservations about aspects of the translation, however some very obvious errors, mainly to do with English grammar, have been corrected. 'geniale', consistently translated in the originals as 'genial', which is an error, has been adjusted where I have noticed it.

(4) If you flinch at the word 'savages' in the passage from Fr Rinaldi, don't be too hard on the translator; he was only translating what he found in the Italian. Remember that these documents are from another era.

(5) The documents were stripped of formatting to concentrate solely on the text, then saved as Word. Obviously a reader can download them and do what he likes with the formatting of the text - it would certainly need some improvement, even in its translated original format. Happy reading!

China Province completes Chinese version of Biographical Memoirs of DB

HONG KONG: 24th January 2005 – The mammoth task of translating the Biographical Memoirs of Don Bosco into Chinese has been completed as of 2005, with the publication of the fifth of a five volume series. The project began in 1985 and has been the work of Salesian Fr Lawrence Yao Wei-Ming, currently a member of the Salesian House of Studies community in Hong Kong. Fr Yao is 71 years of age. The original idea of this translation project came from Fr Massimino, provincial between 1962-68 and who passed to his eternal reward in 1991.

The 19 volumes of the original have been condensed into five volumes in Chinese as part of a careful editing and translation project. It also contains a glossary of key names in both Italian and Chinese.

The completion of this project has been in view of the centenary of the China Province in 2006. All members of the Salesian Family in the Province have been asked to read the five volumes as part of their preparation for the Centenary events. The five volume set has been distributed to all Salesian Cooperator and Past Pupil centres as well as to Salesian communities.

The China Province confreres are focusing on love for the Congregation, especially as gained through a better understanding of its history and journey through to the present. The newly completed project is an example of this love in action on the part of the translator, who is wheel-chair bound and has dedicated his time and effort completely to the task.

It is expected that the entire project will also be available on the web (www.sdb.org) some time in the future.

Timely release of work on Mamma Margaret

TURIN: 29th December 2005 – In what is clearly an exercise in good timing, but also one which adheres to the high standards long-ago set by Don Teresio Bosco, Elledici has released his new 'Vita di Mamma Margherita, La Mamma di Don Bosco' (Life of Mamma Margherita, Don Bosco's Mother) in both hardbound and paperback edition, the latter selling for eight euro. It comes in a context where the expected commentary on the Strenna for 2006 (31st December) will heighten expectations that Mamma Margaret will finally be given the formal recognition that Salesian tradition has given her all these years - a woman of heroic virtue deserving the title 'Blessed'. These expectations have already been heightened by a not-so-chance remark of Pope Benedict XVI to the Rector Major when the former was taking possession, for a week or two, of the Salesian holiday spot in the Italian Alps: "Mamma Margaret's holiness is so obvious that we wouldn't even think the entire process is needed".

Other than St John Bosco's own reflections, contained, passim, in his 'Memoirs of the Oratory', the definitive 'life' of Mamma Margaret up till now has been the Lemoyne version published by SEI, 1956 . Teresio Bosco's draws on that, as also the scholarly works of Stella, Desramaut, Giraudi. It is significant that his bibliography also contains reference to the 'Positio', the document with the Congregation for Saintly Causes outlining Mamma Margaret's virtue and claim to sainthood. There is always a danger that a life of Mamma Margaret becomes a disguised re-run of the life of Don Bosco. Not so with Teresio Bosco. Naturally the two persons are intimately connected, but Teresio Bosco keeps Mamma Margaret on stage throughout in a way similar, perhaps, to a Chekhovian drama where even the foreground conversations cannot be understood without hearing the background ones.

For English-speaking readers there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that for the moment, the work is only available in Italian. The good news is that work has already begun on its translation and the hope is that this will be quickly finished so that discussions can take place on its publication in this language. In the meantime there are two English versions of Mamma Margaret's life available - or rather, one is likely still to be found on Salesian bookshelves around the Region and could be dusted off and read - Peter Lappin's 'Sunshine in the Shadows', while th other is long out of print, a version by the Benziger sisters, Marieli and Rita. In this regard there is further good news. Bosconet contains the full text of this latter version - you can download it from the homepage under 'Some Salesian texts in English translation'. In actual fact, re-reading this version, one senses that it is better than Lappin's and perhaps because written by women, retains some useful insights into the motherly presence in the Oratory.

Resuming transmission! Don Bosco in Japanese

TOKYO: 27th December 2006 – austraLasia took a week's break for both practical (out of touch with internet connections) and spiritual (in touch with the 'silent night, holy night') reasons. But now it's back to business!

Last number (#1717) we noted that Korea had gone about producing a Korean version of the 2004 production of 'Don Bosco'. Worth noting that this was done through official channels, working with the educational broadcasting unit in Seoul and not produced in DVD format. Now comes news that Japan has taken a similar step, the fruit of collaboration amongst Salesians, laity and first rate professional Japanese 'dubbers', but this time in video and DVD formats. The basic translation was done by Fr Michael Shinjiiro Urata SDB, a young researcher on Don Bosco in Japan. Through the tough process of dubbing, these non-Christian professional dubbers came to know who Don Bosco is and, moreover, were inspired and encouraged by his life though they had known nothing of him until involvement in this work. As one said: ' I could learn a great deal from him'.

Several impressions of the film were gathered and published on the Japan Province website after its release:

'I have not known much about Don Bosco, but now I know him much better than before. We were so moved by his sincere and ardent attitudes towards his aims for the young. It was much more effective than hard-to-read words' (a housewife).

'The most powerful message for young people who face many problems in today's society, must be "You are not alone. God is always with you". This film conveys it straight' (A female Religious).

'I was so inspired that there was a man who has risked his life for abandoned youth' (a college student).

'I came to know that real love needs strength. It was very impressive and unforgettable when Don Bosco faced his weakness and limits; he asked openly and simply for help from God' (a female office worker).

'I gained a fine impression and much encouragement from Don Calosso saying: "Since God is our Father, there is no orphan on this earth". I believe this film goes beyond the limits of the Salesians to reach all people and brings a vivid and simple message of the Christian faith'. (a priest).

Naturally, people elsewhere keep asking - and the English edition…when will that be coming? It is worth repeating that this film was produced outside the Salesian ambit (by RAI with Lux Vide) and all arrangements for further work, be it dubbing or translation into other languages is taken up directly with the production company by those groups/provinces/regions after entering into direct negotiation with the company, and undoubtedly at cost.

There are now several translations into European and Asian languages. English is still lacking.

Memorias ba Oratorio: Memoirs of the Oratory available in Tetum

DILI: 11th February 2006 – The translation of the Memoirs of the Oratory into Tetum has been a labour of great love for Fr Rolando Fernandez, who already has a name for important translations into Tetum such as the New Testament, published in 2000. He has done a provisional translation of MO which he would now like Timorese around the world to look through and comment on. Since the text is still in simple Word format, it will be easy enough for him to make necessary changes, while in the meantime he seeks both funding and suitable arrangements for publication.

In the meantime the text is available, in Word format, from Bosconet. There is a link under the 'special' section on the homepage (well down on the right hand side) which will take interested readers to the 'useful Salesian texts' page and from there you can access both the English and now the Tetum version of MO. Alternatively you could simply search from the homepage on Memorias.

Bosconet is particularly happy to host texts of this kind in the languages of the region, especially in situations of diaspora where members of a language other than English have less access to Salesian material in their own language. This could be particularly born in mind for the Chinese and Vietnamese diaspora. In recent discussions amongst the provincials of the region, it was noted that Chinese with Salesian connections are to be found in very large numbers throughout the region in Salesian parishes and other works.

Prevention, not repression The good news-the bad news-the good news

ROME: 17th February 2006 – The good news is that Fr Peter Braido's major work on the preventive system, Prevenire, non reprimere, has been translated into English. The bad news is that, in immortal words quoted earlier, or along those lines at least, 'the effort needs to be reworded'! The good news is that this is underway and you can already begin with what has been done, the which can be found on Bosconet under the rubric of Useful texts.

It seems a shame that one of the best studies in existence on Don Bosco's preventive system has not been available to English-only readers, but the translation of Italian academic texts is a daunting task. Fr Vincent Zuliani SUE (a province not a congregation!) God bless his sterling soul, did a first run through on the translation several years ago and it got lost in paperwork somewhere. By his own admisson it needed several more 'run throughs', besides, it is in barely digital form minus the footnotes, and these make up a substantial part of the text, so they simply have to be added in. But the English speaking world is going to owe a great debt of gratitude to this good man.

In the meantime, there is work to be done. The text has to be stripped back to plain text and reformatted to remove all kinds of unsightly gaps that crept in to the first 'run through'. That's a minor and relatively simple technical task, but time-consuming. Then it needs to be re-read and in places re-written. It is eminently faithful to Braido's Italian, and now needs to become eminently faithful to a universal English readership. Again, time-consuming. Finally - no not finally, but an important third, the footnotes need to be added in and Italian footnoting for academic texts is quite different from that of Chicago or Turabian! Yet again, time-consuming.

Assuming that the above is done in spare time, and given some experience already of the above three tasks, you can assume a week per chapter. There are 19 chapters, so we are looking at something like 5 months. July should see the task completed. In the meantime, you can watch work in progress, and benefit from it. Of course, in the interests of fair dealing, it may be unethical to make all the chapters available in Bosconet, but while my conscience remains flexible, profit by it. The introduction and Chapter 1 are done. A weekly reminder of progress on other chapters will be forthcoming.

Now, there could be even better news. If someone would be prepared to take just a chapter, and reduce the load a bit (they would, of course, need access to the Italian 1999 edition, but that's not too difficult to come by), the job could be done a lot quicker. Any takers? I would be prepared to offer appropriate guidelines and ensure an overall consistency….in other words, you too may get reworded, but there is no question the job would be completed and into the hands of a publisher in something less than five months. That has to be good news for English-only readers. Please note that what you will be reading in Bosconet is not a final version, but it will be the last-but-final. Any comments whatsoever will be welcomed.

GLOSSARY

the which: no, not an error, though a touch archaic.

Chicago or Turabian: two of the most widely accepted English language academic style manuals.

Confreres lining up for the Salesianity Seminar, Thailand!

(and others can read the course materials online)

BANGKOK: 15th October 2006 – The East Asia-Oceania Salesianity Seminar is due to be held at Sampran, Thailand (not so very far from Bangkok) from 2-6 January 2007. The day prior to the commencement of the seminar will be a day for Salesianity teachers from around the region. As notification has already gone out to Provincials, it is expected that enrolment in the seminar will be occurring over these days and weeks. Participation is open to Salesians and memebrs of the Salesian Family.

The Seminar has a descriptive title indicating its clear thrust: To know Don Bosco through the Memoirs of the Oratory and the Biographies of the three young people (Savio, Besucco, Magone). The venue will be the FMA Retreat House at Sampran.

Guiding the process will be the current 'big name' scholar in Salesianity from the UPS, Fr Aldo Giraudo. Although Fr Giraudo will be speaking in Italian, great care has been taken to ensure that all course materials are available in English and that the proceedings are also conducted with translation on hand. There will be both lectures and workshops involved.

The two main course materials on which the seminar will be based are, naturally, the Memoirs of the Oratory and the three biographies of Don Bosco: Savio, Besucco and Magone. This material is available in English from the Bosconet website at www.bosconet.aust.com. For the moment both can be accessed from the home page. But both are also available from the 'Useful Texts' page which can be accessed from the home page. For the moment, look under the 'what's new this week' rubric on the home page for the three biographies (a zip file).

This latter collection (the three lives) was translated many years ago by Fr Cornell from the Australian province. It was published by Salesiana Publishers in Manila then went out of print. Fr Cornell was not working from the last editions which Don Bosco published (DB altered details over as many as five editions). Fr Cornell had also added comments of his own since he had wanted these biographies to be used in a particular way. The version on Bosconet has a translation substantially that of Fr Cornell's, but adjusted to come into line with the last printed editions we have of Don Bosco's, minus any additional notes and with the inclusion of Don Bosco's own footnotes (at times amounting to almost another book!). Hence you have here a most valuable resource. The zip file contains these texts in three formats - rtf (openable in Word but also other text programs), html (web version) and xml (a storage format which guarantees that these texts may be converted into very many formats including voice if needs be).

During the seminar, Bosconet will also offer a section within Boscowiki which could enable people who are both participants and non-participatns to be involved.

Memoirs of the Oratory - text available in full web version

ROME: 28th November 2006 – Mindful of the reccomendation of the Rector Major, as he moves around provinces, that confreres, and Rectors in particular, should make an effort to read the Memoirs of the Oratory at least once a year, a version of this primary source is now available in English on Bosconet (under the What's new section on the home page for the moment).

Should you be asking, in fact, 'What's new about that?', a word of explanation is in order.

Firstly, we are talking of the 1989 Don Bosco Publications, New Rochelle edition, which has been out of print for some time now. Effectively that has been the only English version, and a most valuable one too, for its translation, notes and bibliography. A new updated edition of this, corrected in terms of translation where necessary, is in the pipeline.

The point is this, however. People have been clamouring for copies of the English version, and as a result a number of 'online versions' have cropped up, one of which is already available from the Philippines but hosted from Cambodia - a link to that is available on the Bosconet homepage too. The difficulty of these versions is that they come from low-end scanned versions which introduce errors into the text on the one hand, and are simply 'the book' webified on the other.

Another approach is needed to meet the nature of the medium, which has no 'pages' in reality, even though we call it a web page. How, for example, does one represent a footnote when there is no page? It has to be an end-note, obviously. And then what happens? Will someone be prepared to sit down and laboriously move 895 or thereabout footnotes to the end, and link them to the correct spot in the text? Hardly.

Fortunately, there is software (free, and open source, incidentally) which permits the conversion of a high-end scanned or original digital text into a storage format called XML. From there it can be rendered for the web according to principles of the web. It can just as easily be rendered from the same XML format for printing to paper, and so on. The end result is a text stored accurately for posterity and capable of rendering in a variety of media. It is this latter XML process that has been applied to MO - and the result is a version for the web which allows one to navigate it in a variety of ways, including moving back and forwards between text and end-note, or moving between one footnote reference and another when an internal reference is made. This latter was necessary because footnotes applied to a chapter, whereas the endnotes are at the end of the entire text, so run cumulatively almost as far as 900! Without cross-referenced notes the reader would now be lost on the web if note 3 in one chapter sends the reader to note 6 in another, which is no longer note 6 but 106 or whatever! Cross-referencing has overcome this problem.

The only material the web version does not include (though it would be possible to provide a link to these if people felt they needed them) is the illustrations in the book. It makes little sense to try to place images in a web version as if it were a book. It is much easier to make these available separately if they are needed.

Enjoy! In due course, this material (there is now a developing set of XML-based resources on Bosconet) will move to a page of its own. For now, consult it from the home page.

Salesianity workshop underway in Thailand

SAMPRAN: 1st January 2007 – Participants, somewhere around 100 of them, have been arriving for the start of the Salesianity Workshop at Sampran (near Bangkok) tomorrow. The Workshop is entitled 'The story behind the stories' and is based on the Three 'lives' written by Don Bosco - biographies of Dominic Savio, Francis Besucco and Michael Magone - and the Memoirs of the Oratory. The Workshop is being conducted by Fr Aldo Giraudo, Salesian scholar and lecturer in Salesianity at the UPS, Rome and Turin. Fr Giraudo will lead participants, who hail from various groups of the Salesian Family and from virtually all provinces of the East Asia-Oceania Region, through elements of the narrative spirituality and pedagogy apparent in these texts.

All of the texts, and an English translation of the materials for interpretation which will be presented by Fr Giraudo (who will work in his own language, Italian, but with translation) are available on Bosconet. The versions of the three lives and the Memoirs of the Oratory are available in either booklet form (doc format) or in web format (html). Both sets of translations, which had existed previously and in some instances have been out of print for a number of years, have been worked through and corrected. Of interest to readers generally is that the version of the Memoirs of the Oratory which participants will be working with in English (the booklet 'doc' format version) has been corrected by Fr Arthur Lenti for a number of errors that were in the earlier published version. This makes the current version referred to the most accurate available to English readers today.

The Workshop will conclude on 6th January. It is expected that further items of news on this event will emanate from the workshop setting itself - a number of austraLasia correspondents are participating. Keep yourselves posted!

An ambassadorial act without rival!

ROME: 18th January 2007 – If you were to say that just about the only person of note not present that night was the Holy Father, you would not be far off the mark. South Korean ambassador to the Holy See, Mr Bosco Seong Youm, at the Holy See since 2003, has long wanted to express his gratitude to Salesians in particular, a good number of whom played particular roles over his lifetime, growing up, studying (at the UPS), holding academic positions of note and finally taking up his current role.

One only needs to imagine the list of invitees - several of his former professors are now holding one or other 'purple' position; there are three other ambassadors to the Holy See who are past pupils, also.

The invitation to an evening of 'gratitude' was extended to the Rector Major and his Vicar as well as a number of Council members with Korean connections. The evening was 16th January.

Mr Seong shared some of his vocational story with those present, first as a past pupil, then as a Salesian himself, and finally as a married man and active lay person in the Korean Church. He noted that he was baptized 'Bosco' at a time, still during the 2nd World War, but not many years after Fr Auffray's life of Don Bosco had been translated into Korean for the first time. This gave rise to some enthusiasm amongst the clergy for Don Bosco. Soon after the Korean war, in 1953, he was accepted into the Salesian school at Kwanju as a border and orphan. On his mother's death the Salesian catechist had told him not to worry, since Mary would now be his mother. He has kept that thought and reflected on its truth in his life since.

During the '80s Mr Seong studied at the UPS and majored in Latin. He returned to Korea, and eventually rose to the ranks of professor of philosophy at the prestigious So-Gang university, and the University of Foreign Languages at Seoul. He was also by now regarded as the foremost Latin scholar in those parts and took up the translation of Augustine's De Civitate Dei, receiving the philosophy (western) award for the effort. He maintains a solid regime of translation and other writing, with some 100 titles to his name, including Christian Churches in a Time of Relativism. He has also founded a Theological Research Centre and has been president of the Korean Catholic Human Rights Committee.

Recently, when the about-to-be-appointed UN Secretary General, Mr Ban Ki Moon, visited Rome, Mr Seong took him on a guided tour of the Catacombs (St Caliistus, naturally) and handed him a copy of the Compendium of Social Teaching of the Catholic Church as a 'vademecum' for his new service to the world at the UN.

The evening was not all serious. It was replete with entertainment (pieces from Cimatti's 'Mark the Fisherman' and Cagliero's 'Cacciatore'), some Korean dancing and a traditional Good Night from the Rector Major, proud, as Don Bosco would have been, of a past pupil who, by virtue of the education received, was now contributing so much to Church and society. Mr Seong has several children, one of whom is a Salesian in Seoul.

Translateathon! Your help would be appreciated - and you can learn something

ROME: 12th February 2007 – Something with a difference today. Call it a translateathon or anything else you like, but it is an extension of an idea floated some months ago via Boscowiki. Collaborative effort throughout the English-speaking world where it is possible to do this - via what is known as a 'wiki' (meaning, in Hawaiian, 'very fast').

While there is an official translation of the full texts of the Salesian Proper, two things happen - Salesian 'holiness' is an ongoing thing, along with Vatican processes - so new people are constantly being added, well ahead of the printers' ability to keep up things! The other is that language sensitivities change or are culturally conditioned, so a number of places and people make small adjustments in things like Collects, bidding prayers and the like.

So that's the basic background. We are talking of private efforts rather than public ones in this (good) world of immense variety. Fr Mike Mendl from New Rochelle has been beavering away at a range of Collects, working from the original language back into English, and has come up with some revised versions. I think they are pretty good, but inevitably need some touching up here and there. All these Collects are available in their English freshened up versions on the translation page for Boscowiki. If you need that link in its raw form here it is: http://www.bosconet.aust.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ProperPrayers-Collects-ForSalesianSaints. That should take you to the page with the prayers on it, all 12 of them. It just may take you to the edit version, in which case simple switch up top to 'view'. To work on these (and for the most part you may wish to just change a word or short phrase) you simply click on 'edit'. You will now see a version with what is called 'markup', additional symbols (all very obvious and simple ones which create the end result. It is called wiki markup). In fact, if you are just changing words, you can ignore all markup and just change the words. It is that simple!

Do not forget at the end to go to the bottom of the edit page and hit 'save' (not 'save and edit'). It would help if, in the summary box there you put int he words you changed but it is not absolutely necessary. I can trace every change and if needs be go back to earlier versions. If you think you know enough wiki markup to put your changes in green, then do so. You would put %green% in front of the changed word(s) and %% immediately after. Done.

Looking forward to wide contribution - you can add in comments too of course if you wish. Remember always to make a clear space between one line and the next (that is, hit 'enter' twice to make two paragraph breaks). There - you have now learned how to contribute to wikis anywhere in the world, including wikipedia! Good luck - and let's show how the English-speaking world can actually collaborate on translation.

Question? The originals? Well, three possibilities - the translator (MM) is overall accurate - it is a question of improved language phrasing, vocabulary, so the originals are not really needed. The best we can offer is the Italian on www.sdb.org under 'santità', then look for 'liturgia' or 'eucaristia', but try the English of all that too for the official translations, viz., Salesian Saints, then choose from Blesseds or Saints or whatever to find your man (or woman).

A collaborative 'first'. Pat yourself on the back!

ITALY-INDIA-USA-AUSTRALIA…20th February 2007 – We cannot be sure where all the contributors came from, but at least from the nations named here. It is possible to claim a little 'first', I think, in that as the result of collaborative work using the Boscowiki 'translation' invitation, a number of people worked on a dozen 'collects' which have not appeared before in any formal printed version, and some indeed have not appeared before in English. The exercise took little more than a week.

Fr Mike Mendl, from New Rochelle, was the first to put up a tentative effort to adjust some earlier versions of collects for recently beatified members of the Salesian Family. His aim was to present them in good, flowing contemporary English where they begged for this, and to translate several that were not in English at all (both the original Latin and the Italian of these was available on sdb.org). Then Fr Chris Woerz from the other side of the US saw them and decided to work at presenting these in a respectable and attractive layout, adding in material on the life of each individual - and a photo. In the meantime, confreres from around the English-speaking world hopped in and offered some careful suggestions - a comma here, a new line there, an altered phrase there again and so forth. Mike then took all these from the wiki and brought it all together. I've converted them to pdf and put them on Bosconet.

The final result, a Word file, amounted to 9 mb which was far too much for anyone to be able to download, especially if on a poor line. Open Office Writer's default capacity to save as pdf brings them down to a little over 2 mb. Still difficult for some to download, but most will manage. The 'Salesian Collects' package (remembering these are just a handful of them to do with recent 'Beati') can be found on Bosconet under the What's New section beneath recent news items (home page).

What the effort does prove, of course, is that we now have the collaborative tools and some willingness around not just EAO but other parts of the English-speaking world to achieve small tasks like this.

Within a week or two I hope to be able to announce a much more daring but potentially satisfying venture which will call for collaborative effort across all the main languages of our region - it will require the translation of phrases (perhaps about two dozen, no more) and one or two paragraphs - maybe no more than one hour's work for someone in Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tetum, Bahasa, Korean, Thai - at least those. Should readers of Hindi and Kanada be interested, they could also be part of it. Should you be interested in helping, you may flag that interest even at this early stage.

In the meantime - pat yourselves on the back!

Timor missionary has much to thank the Lord for

DILI: 12th May 2007 – Fr Rolando Fernandez, long-time missionary in East Timor, is still thanking God for his and others' miraculous survival last Sunday (6th May) when their vehicle plunged into a ravine. It was 10th May before he was able to circulate a few details of the event - in his letter he does not indicate the place where the incident occurred, but he does give sufficient detail of the event itself.

'After the Mass in a village chapel, I took a car (he was not driving) along with some of the faithful whose house was along the way. As we were going downhill from the chapel, the driver almost missed a curb which would have plunged the vehicle into a deep ravine. I called his attention and he turned sharply to the other side. The car hit the upper slope, overturned and plunged into the ravine. Fortunately a small tree stopped our fall'. Fr Rolando goes on to describe how he pulled all the people from the vehicle, including the driver who was unconscious. They climbed back up to the road and were taken to hospital by a construction truck. The children on board were unscathed, as also a woman in late pregnancy. Fr Rolando and another woman were detained at the hospital for further observation. He points out, wrily, that 'they x-rayed my head and found nothing there'! He and the other passenger were kept overnight, then released the following morning.

One week after the event, Fr Rolando says he is still very sore and bruised, but there are no broken bones and the medical prognosis is that he will heal quickly enough. Indeed, he is hoping to return to the chapel tomorrow for the Sunday Mass. Fr Rolando, who has done much translation work in recent years, had just completed the translation into Tetum of The Little Catechism, and had only several days before consigned it to 'Aid to the Church in Need' in Germany, for publication. He had worked from the Portuguese and English editions to do the translation. As he put it, 'I thought that with this work, my job is done. But on being told in the hospital that everything is ok, and that the pain is normal after such accident and will subside in time, I see that the Lord still has some work for me to do, and I pray that I may be able to do it to the best of my ability. Please join me in thanking the Lord for this “new” lease of life'.

An interesting translation tale with a Salesian twist

ROME: 17th January 2008 – The Salesian Family Spirituality Days begin in Rome today, 27th January. They are the most heavily booked of the series over its 26 years of existence - a response, no doubt to intense interest in the Rector Major's challenging strenna for 2008. There is just a handful, a rather small handful, of participants from EAO region. That's just by way of broad introduction to a story that is not related directly to these special Days ahead, but it is to the Salesian Family.

If you receive the www.sdb.org fortnightly newsletter, you will see that we have switched to a little rubric which says 'Do you want to help us out with translation' or something to that effect (rather than what we were saying before - 'there is a new translation interface on sdb.org'). The question rather than the statement is having most interesting results.

Recently I was contacted by someone responding to that question. She lives in another part of the world altogether - in a very troubled little nation (I'm leaving out names of people and places), but she is of South American extraction, writes, and I presume speaks faultless English, handles French well enough and of course has Spanish as a mother tongue. A couple of questions she asked me suggested her immediate Salesian connections might be tenuous, so I asked her to fill me in a little on what her Salesian connections actually were. Here's what she gave me: "We are relations of Dorothea Chopitea. My mother's family is a descendant of a sister of Dorothea. My grand mother met Don Bosco [this lady must be of reasonable age!] and Don Orione and I keep letters from the latter to her". She goes on to explain that in the country she is in, it is not safe for her to be outside so she works from home and is looking for things to do. Her husband works and it is safe enough for him to leave the house she believes, but not for her. So in her solitude, she has turned to the Salesian Web Page and…voilà! She wants to help out with the translation of material on the Salesian Saints and Blesseds, especially in Spanish.

I thought, given the 'Salesian Family' emphasis right at the moment in the Salesian world, this little anecdote might be of interest. (And with holidays in some parts of the EAO region, not a lot of other news is flowing in at the moment!). I am sure this good woman would appreciate the prayers of readers, and we certainly appreciate her obvious competence and the fact that the Good Lord has inspired her to give a helping hand. It's a 'good' cyberspace story to share!

First phase coming to a close: regional study of RM's report

ROME: 6th March 2008 – By late evening on 6th, the regions had met yet a second time to look over an excellent summary of their earlier efforts to reflect on the RM's report on the state of the Congregation. In the meantime they had also plied him with questions, some of which were answered by one or other Councillor for a sector, but the majority of which were answered by him. It is worth just saying here, that given 'simultaneous translation', which is working well overall (we think!), when the RM responds to these questions he has a lot to say in a short space of time, so the speed of delivery means translation must come through at the same speed - fine for mother tongue English speakers, but possibly a little daunting for some others. Still and all, there are lots of helpful people around (including the Regional, Fr Klement, who we see busy scribbling notes to help anyone who might feel linguistically poor and abandoned!).

The EAO Region put two questions to the RM with reference to the 'new directions' comment in his report - how crucial did he think the current situation of young people was with regard to the next six years of planning, and what might be implications for our structures if we were to move into some of these 'new ministries'? The question surfaced in other ways with other regions, coming down to the more general question of the struggle between keeping traditional works and structures versus moving out to new needs. The core of the RM's response to this (and it is just as crucial an issue for Europe) is that the Salesian can never remain indifferent to the cry of the young; Salesians will seek to respond. And the Salesian is an educator - something which goes well beyond simply schooling.

His answer then was not of the this-is-how-to-do-it variety but of the here-are-the-principles-for-you-to-work-out-how-to-do-it kind. The other interesting feature of his response to this general issue - and this is not news if you have followed his comments in recent times - is his appeal for a 'Project Europe'. The RM has spoken of this several times outside of the Chapter context but has strongly reinforced it now, calling on the memory of thousands of European Salesian missionaries sent since Don Bosco's time all over the world. It is now time, it would seem, for a quid pro quo.

In the course of the morning, the RM also told the Assembly, and again this might well be known already if people have followed his role at the USG level, that the Holy Father had asked him to be part of a group which is reflecting on new manifestations of 'consecrated life' (which may not be 'religious life' as we know it). He would identify the most successful new forms of CL as having at least the following five characteristics: clear identity, bearers of something relevant (which gives them energy), sense of family and fraternity (which gives them enthusiasm and makes them attractive), deep love for the Church, and that they can be recognised as a 'movement', with all the complex working together that this implies.

Chapter ramblings

ROME: 14th March 2008 – Firstly, apologies for a short break in news, not because there isn't any (though it's not a period of dramatic stuff by any means) but because some demands take precedence over writing up a bit of news! Just uploading the bits and pieces into the GC26 site takes more time than might meet the eye. Anyway…

The Chapter is taking its time to make decisions - a good thing in itself. There is no air of frenetic hurry, but things are moving on. In fact I've just completed the translation of the first redrafting of 'Return to Don Bosco' which will be one part (not necessarily the first, maybe even the last, depending on how the Assembly wants to 'assemble' things at the end) of the final document. It may yet get bashed about a bit in the Assembly and by commissions, but at least we begin to see something take shape. The structure of each part, as you find it in the Working Document, won't change it seems - people seem pretty happy with it. But it is a simplified approach in style and content, from what you currently see in the Working Document. Personally I think people are going to like what they see, but it's too early to pontificate on something like that. I notoe that the Italian text has occasionally taken refuge in '-ismo's, which cause us English speakers headaches. The tendency to nominalise (turn things into abstract nouns) where we in English prefer a verb, is a challenge to translation, and sometimes an -ismo can be vague either way. I mean, what do they really want to say by 'immobilismo'? I'm flying a kite by translating it as ultra-conservatism instead of mere rigidity, and may end up like the kite-runner chasing my shot-down words through some backstreet. Despite the negative idea of 'immobilismo' let me say that the 'return to Don Bosco' is very positively expressed.

I'll seek permission to publish one intervention which has not as yet been heard by the Assembly. It has a touch of brilliance about it and simply moves the heart, probably better than many a long-winded document can do - but that's yet to come. Stay tuned! The cartoons continue to be a good narrative reading of the Chapter, so don't forget to dip into those.

The juridical commission keeps going back to work after flying its own kites in the Assembly - most of them keep flying! The longest and most heated discussion was over the GC25 decision to tie the Salesian Family to the Vicar. The likelihood is that it will stay that way for the next six period since there have been some very positive results from it - but it has raised the question of an already overburdened structure of government and animation that will need another Chapter to focus on in its own right. Likewise, the 'departments of the Salesian mission' (YM, SC, Missions) will probably stay as they are but what will eventuate in all likelihood is a far more coordinated effort between them. How that will happen has to be voted on. I'm just signalling some of the trends in discussion.

The Cardinal Secretary of State will be here for Mass tomorrow morning. A certain degree of not-so-obvious Vatican and Italian security accompanies these visits. Mercifully Saturday afternoon and Sunday are quiet times and the sensible ones get out.

Translation, interpretation…. and just getting the thing right in the end!

ROME: 19th March 2008 – It's the Feast of St Joseph. Not liturgically speaking since that was celebrated here earlier, given Holy Week, but it happens to be the 'Name Day' of the Holy Father so the Vatican was not working today (making it a little tough for those wanting Papal Blessings for an Easter wedding)! Nevertheless, the Vatican did publish the Pope's letter to GC26 in five languages on its site - which begins to raise a question. One amongst many. That letter was translated here (Pisana) with due care and attention so it would be ready for its presentation by Cardinal Farina, as happened. Now there is a Vatican translation. Which one will the GC26 document quote? 'The Vatican version' I hear you say, and I do not deny it - except that some people went to some trouble to make sure it was previously well translated. One day the Church might get its act together.

And which version of Scripture will adorn the heading of the five themes which will make up the final GC26 document? Remember that the original is usually Hebrew, Greek, Latin - and modern versions can be quite recent. There's the question (in Italian) of the new Lectionary introduced at the beginning of Advent, for instance.

Of course, we look for 'official' translations of anything, in the first instance - but it is not always absolutely obvious which is to be official. Welcome, my friends, to just one of the behind-the-scenes stories of GC26. And that's but a part of it. Few know the real difference between 'translation' and 'interpretation'. Few, I mean, who get up and speak in the Aula. 'Translation' means they have a text they are working from and have thought of providing it to those in the booths above. If they haven't provided such a text (more than 70% of them, I would say) then it becomes 'simultaneous interpretation'. No problem there; the people with the skills are ready for either - it's one or the other, but they are not the same skill. Translation, even on sight, is easier, except if it's Commission 'x' which has added 15 dot-points and wants to read them and their motivations at the rate of knots. That can be a challenging exercise in the booth, and probably for those who are listening. Simultaneous translation is easy enough once you get used to listening and speaking at the same time…. so long as it is a language you are familiar with. If not, it becomes one step removed as you simultaneously interpret someone else who is simultaneously interpreting. …Kind of works. Kind of. And then there's the post-translations, the re-translation of texts that have been bashed about by Commissions and plenary Assembly sessions and need to be ready for the morrow - they may arrive late in the day (or your email breaks down and it's later still). One very good feature of this Chapter, at least as far as English is concerned, is that Americans, Indians, South Africans, British, Irish, Chinese, Filipinos…… have I missed anyone? Oh, Australians, and probably many others, all have some purchase on this language, want to own it, and certainly want the text to be the best it can be. So they throw their bit in - that can be a bit rough for the poor guy who's actually doing the work till after midnight, but in the end it's the right process.

There ARE questions, however! I'm going to raise just one or two.

Italian loves the word 'protagonista' (or 'protagonismo'), and we Salesians have used it a fair bit. Problem is, there are few respectable English dictionaries and fewer still real situations that allow it to be used to mean what Italian means by it. For us it means a leading character in a play or movie, or a movement; some sort of champion, a spokesman maybe. But none of these are quite what it is in a Salesian Italian text. It is my view that the constant habit we have had over many years, of meaning-transfer (the word looks almost the same as an English word so transfer the meaning in Italian to the English word, or worse, 'anglify' the Italian, which is how we got 'economer') is to be broken, somehow. That means choosing fresher language. Then there's 'collaboratore'. It's not as much of a problem, for after all, it does have a respectable pedigree … but unfortunately for many in the English-speaking world it always carries an undertone of treachery, and we don't really want that, do we?

In the end we are the servants of the Chapter - but I think the process, at least for one Commission which has a distinct interest in English, is a good one. They have a subgroup which looks at the translation-on-the-run (the best description for it during the Chapter), exercises some mercy for the fact that it was done late at night, makes suggestions which cover the range of 'englishes', and … hopes for the best!

But thank God for Easter. After a little less work tomorrow, Thursday, the Chapter breaks for the Triduum.

Evangelisation - a central yet demanding work requiring the light of the Holy Spirit

ROME: Holy Thursday, 20th March 2008 – Evangelisation in a moment. Firstly, may I simply emphasise the point made yesterday by drawing directly from the Vatican and 'official' translation of the Pope's message to GC26. Here is the Italian phrase, one which Fr Bernard Grogan (who did 'our' translation) and I agonised over beforehand to get right:

"Non vi può essere un'ardente mistica senza una robusta ascesi che la sostenga…". And here is the Vatican translation of that phrase: "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 (Pope was not speaking to women religious, I take it, when addressing us). What was our translation? "There cannot be a passionate mystical dimension without a solid asceticism to support it". We believe that this latter interpretation of what the Pope said is in fact the correct one. 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?

Another trap - an unnamed Vatican official who spoke to the Chapter Assembly quoted our Constitutions to us - except that he misquoted them. Of course, we do it ourselves often without realising it. How many of us trot off the phrase: 'Honest citizens and good Christians". What does our official Constitutional text say on this one? Check it out in C. 31! Again the point is not a minor one - and maybe the hallowed Constitutions themselves in English translation have introduced the odd error - Fr Mazzali pointed to a likely error in the English translation of R 187 that has got the juridical commission poring over commentaries and the like.

On to evangelisation. It is a pretty central theme in the Da mihi animas cetera tolle, and it is getting an exhaustive workover in commissions and assemblies. There are those who feel that the 'urgency' is not there so far, and there are those who feel that it will work out somehow - it always does! Actually to be fair to that view, we have to put it maybe in the words of one contributor: "the core element of evangelisation becomes a subtle mix between taking initiatives and the necessary reserve to give space to things that revive spontaneously" (like a forest recovers after a hurricane or bushfire. An interesting view. The core point might be 'zeal'. What moves our heart, as one contributor put it (Fr Klement, as it happens) and what moves our heart to see the urgency of evangelising, including 'ad gentes'.

The Easter pause will be more important for its content than its pause, at this point - seeking the answer in the Passover, the death, the resurrection and what then 'got to' the disciples as they became aware that something totally new was happening, something they just had to witness to. Maybe we'll get to the 'new Pentecost' after all.

TO INVEST OR NOT TO INVEST: A CONCRETE ISSUE OF SALESIAN POVERTY

Ivo Coelho sdb

ROME, APRIL 9, 2008: Fr Maraccani, the redoubtable Procurator General and long time former Secretary General, provided the chapter this morning with an interpretation of Art. 187 of the Constitutions and Art. 187 of the Regulations, both of which deal with investments.

The interpretation had been requested by Bro. Claudio Marangio, the new Economer General. Earlier, Fr Gianni Mazzali, the out-going Economer General, had responded to a question about interest-bearing investments, pointing out that the English translation of the Art. 187 of the Constitutions was defective: the Italian talks about excluding "every other form of permanent capitalizzazione fruttifera", while the English text says that "every other mind of interest-bearing investment is forbidden". As can be seen, the English text excludes the word 'permanent', 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.

While Maraccani's interpretation went along the lines of upholding the canonical and traditionally Salesian exclusion of interest-bearing investments (for lack of a better translation), Mazzali points out 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 armament industry. This could be avoided if we chose to invest instead directly in certain industries or businesses with certain ethical guarantees. This was, in fact, one of the reasons behind the attempt by the Salesians and some other religious congregations to set up Polaris. Mazzali is pointing out that it is time, in the changed circumstances of finance and industry today, to make a shift from considerations of interest-bearing capitalization to those of ethical investment. That such investments should be directly oriented to our mission, goes without saying.

A GC26 Aid for your perusal - and another helpful 'geek' tip!

MELBOURNE: 3rd September 2008 – A kind member of the Australia-Pacific Province has put together a handy little set of reminders from GC26 that could easily be used on noticeboards in communities, or kept for personal perusal.

He prepared them as simple Word documents - they are the 'Let each community….' and 'Let each Salesian….' lists of practical items from the five parts of the final GC26 document. I have turned them into pdf format as well, and they are available in both doc and pdf format from the SDL English collection. The quickest way to find them is to go the the English collection, 'Titles', then 'G' in the alphabetical list - you'll find them there.

As for the 'geek' tip, this would be of interest to anyone who seriously has to consider translation and would like to make use of translation memory without having to pay for it! You need to use OpenOffice Writer for both the ideas that follow, but since OO.o is free, can be run on any platform, and is a better product than the other word processor many use, why not try it?

Translation, for those who need to do it on the more than the occasional basis, benefits from at least two processes: segmentation of a text in manageable bits (usually sentences), and translation memory. The top translation programs cost anything from $300-$1000 and are beyond our range! Fortunately, the past several years have seen great development in this field in the open source arena. So here are the two tips.

(1) OmegaT (Google it). It's cross-platform, based on Java (which the download will include). The advantage of this program is that it will take a fully-formatted OpenOffice document (which could be a Word document then saved as .odt) and when you have finished your work it will return it to its fully formatted state 'behind the scenes', including footnotes. That is of enormous advantage. Should you be interested in using this program and need some help, let me know. I can get you up to speed in no time, even by email.

(2) Anaphraseus. Well, it used be called 'OpenWordfast' but maybe the Russian who wrote it ran foul of the Brit who wrote a much more expensive and very good one called 'Wordfast'! Anaphraseus is in beta and a little buggy but well worth keeping an eye on. It's very clever. I use it for shorter items. It's an OpenOffice Writer extension, so adds a toolbar to Writer and away you go. You might need a little help in setting it up - I can help there. But once set up, it works and works well! If you are not translating with some regularity forget it - translation memory will be of little use to you.

The main advantage of either of these is that they can halve your work if you are regularly translating. jbf

Sundials midst the snow!

ROME: 3rd February 2009 – Should you visit Chieri's former seminary, where the young Bosco once read: afflictis lentae, celeres gaudentibus horae', you would be disappointed today. It is no longer there. The gap has been filled in with crumbling, cleaner bricks and they say the sundial, better known as a 'meridiana geografica astronomica universale', is under repair! In Italy that may mean a century. Recall what Bosco said to his friend Garigliano at the time? "Here's our programme! Let's be happy and time will fly!"

Could not help but muse on what the Congregation might be today had the young Bosco found a different sundial with different words:

EX ORIENTE LUX: the first missionary expedition would have been to China.

DA MIHI SOLEM, DABO TIBI HORAM: he did find something like it - and got Tibidabo as well (Barcelona)!

NULLA DIES SINE LINEA: Don Bosco the Blogger?

NON NUMERO HORAS NISI SERENAS: he'd have studied in Venice, not Chieri. Mission to Seamen?

SILENS LOQUOR: we'd all be monks…

ORA ET LABORA: Benedictine monks…

SINE SOLE SILEO: in Siberia or some other dark, dank place.

But thank God he didn't find this one:

O God! methinks it were a happy life,

To be no better than a homely swain;

To sit upon a hill, as I do now,

To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,

Thereby to see the minutes how they run,

How many make the hour full complete;

How many hours bring about the day;

How many days will finish up the year;

How many years a mortal man may live.

When this is known, then to divide the times:

So many hours must I tend my flock;

So many hours must I take my rest;

So many hours must I contemplate;

So many hours must I sport myself;

So many days my ewes have been with young;

So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean;

So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:

So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,

Passed over to the end they were created,

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. (William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part III, Act 2 scene 5)

We'd all be bonkers! Or British!

(This is just to cheer up readers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe who are snowed under. Meanwhile 'downunder' they don't want to hear about sundials or sun anything!).

And for your information, you can now check out the sundial as it was in Chieri, and is now and ever shall be in Becchi. Just go 'sundial' under 'subjects' in SDL in the 'Don Bosco scritti..' collection. And another set of items you might be interested in - Don Bosco's various signatures. Go 'signatures' under 'subjects' in the same.

Lenti volumes available for Asia, Oceania, Africa

BANGALORE: 27th February 2009 – Kristu Jyoti Publications, Bangalore, have announced that they have completed publication of the first four volumes of Fr Art Lenti's monumental work on Don Bosco, under the title of Don Bosco, History and Spirit. By arrangement with Rome, KJP were asked to publish this material and make it available especially in regions covering Asia, Oceania and Africa.

Volumes available are:

Vol. 1: Don Bosco's formative years in historical context (520 pp, $USD 20)

Vol 2: Birth and early development of Don Bosco's Oratory (256 pp. $USD 11)

Vol 3: Don Bosco: educator, spiritual master, writer, founder of the Salesian Congregation (340 pp. $USD 14)

Vol 4: Beginnings of the Salesian Society and its Constitutions (356 pp.

Packing and posting will be extra of course. Copies can be ordered from:

Kristu Jyoti Publications

Kristu Jyoti College,

Salesians of Don Bosco

Bangalore 560 036

India

kristujyotipub@yahoo.co.in

Don Bosco History and Spirit Volume 5 now available

ROME: 6th March 2009 – It was only a few days ago that we made it known that Volumes 1-4 of the Lenti series Don Bosco History and Spirit has been reprinted in India and made available to our region at lower prices. Now, by LAS in Rome, Volume 5 has been published for the first time: 'Institutional expansion' is its sub-title. It retails at €23.50. Quite possibly the Indian Salesians who are officially reprinting these items will wait until the final two of the series are published before completing their task.

Volume 5 tackles development in Don Bosco's ever-widening perspective and response to needs of Church and world. This volume is limited to that perspective within what we now call 'Italy', but its chapters deal with topics of particular interest to the wider Salesian world today.

There is a chapter on Don Bosco's growing commitment to schools, and his penchant for the Boarding school (collegio) in Italian. It's a pity Arthur Lenti did not have on hand one tiny little example of the impact of this development for Italy as a whole. He points out that boarding schools were a time-honoured institution already, and the reasons for Don Bosco's readiness to develop his response to the salvation of souls, especially of the young, through this means. The Vocabolario Illustrato Della Lingua Italiana, a Readers Digest selection under the editorship of G. Devoto and G.C. Colli, a two volume dictionary very well accepted in Italy, has the following comment amongst other on its entry for 'collegio': 'comunità scolastica organizzata nell'ambito di un convitto… c. gestito da Salesiani…

There are chapters on Don Bosco's use of two Marian symbols - Immaculate and Help of Christians, and on the founding of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. There is another chapter on Don Bosco's unofficial mediations between the Holy see and the Italian Government as regards the appointment of bishops

Another chapter I personally found very interesting and useful is chapter 6 on the Salesian Brother and the Salesian lay vocation.

As always with these books, given the paucity of thoroughly developed studies material in English, there is a wealth of information, and despite the scholarly nature of the subject, Fr Lenti manages to keep it very readable indeed.

Blessed Artemides Zatti and human rights promotion in ITM

SUNTER, JAKARTA: 16th March 2009 – Although the Feast of Blessed Artemides Zatti was not celebrated liturgically on the Third Sunday of Lent, the Salesians in Jakarta met together in the evening to dine together and also outline several Salesian related themes in the Indonesian context. The recent discourse of the Rector Major on Human Rights and the Preventive System (January 4, 2009) has been translated into Indonesian and circulated amongst Salesians. The memory of Blessed Artemides Zatti became the occasion to gather around and reflect on how this holy Salesian Brother in his Viedma community and hospital apostolate was able to live out the preventive system spirituality according to values contained in human rights promotion. The key idea was the Rector Major's invitation to Salesians today. He is asking us to look into fresh ways and new frontiers for making Don Bosco alive in our settings, through our presence, hence let us try out the ways we can share in Don Bosco's loving kindness (Preventive System) in the implementation of attitudes and policies of respect towards human rights of the young and our collaborators. Among those present were the Post novitiate confreres, the Practical Trainees, formators, Salesian Brothers and a Salesian Cooperator. Fr Peter Tukan translated the Rector Major's discourse, and Bro. Ephrem Santos gave the conference based on a visual presentation in Powerpoint format.

'Seedlings' characterise two East Asian celebrations of MHC (note: 3 separate news items follow, including the Breaking News final item below)

TOKYO, MIYAZAKI, BEPPU, NAGASAKI (GIA): 25th May 2009 – Sunday evening, 24th May 2009 saw simultaneous gatherings of the Salesian Family in four Japanese cities, with Japanese precision: 4 p.m. Unfortunately the intended fifth gathering in Osaka could not take place due to a feared outbreak of Swine Flu. The events were a significant moment in the Japanese Province in celebrations for the 150th of the Salesian Congregation.

In Tokyo the event took place in the Shimoigusa Church where some 250 members of the Salesian Family took part in a solemn Mass at which the provincial, Fr Cipriani, presided. He spoke in his homily of the significance of the day especially in its historical context. The celebration included an Offertory Procession which included plants, symbols of the 'seedlings' sown by Don Bosco and his sons throughout the world. The Caritas Sisters of Miyazaki Choir helped solemnize the event.

DALAT (VIE): 25th May 2009 – As is commonly known, the Salesian Family prays for and celebrates the sending of its missionaries in October, yet in Vietnam it can be said that the Feast of Mary Help of Christians, 24th May (this year on 25th in fact), is the date for the sending out of missionaries. In Dalat, the post-novitiate community, the Feast of Mary Help of Christians coincides with Commencement Day for its graduates. At this time, those who have applied to become missionaries are formally informed of the acceptance of their application and given the name of their future country of mission. The parents of these young confreres are invited to participate in the celebration and witness the commitment of their sons to Missio ad gentes. It is worth noting that during the last decade, a significant number of post-novices from Vietnam Province have applied to become missionaries ad gentes: 50 to date. Last year, eight of the graduated post-novices applied and all now are being assigned to their missionary land. This year, nine of the fifteen graduates applied and seven of them were accepted. The remaining two need to check their physical suitability, and their applications will later be reviewed. The seven will be sent to five countries: Peru, Venezuela, Paraguay, Zambia, and Bangladesh.

At the conclusion of the traditional Salesian Academy to honour Mary Help of Christians, on the evening of 24th May, the rite of presenting the flags of countries where Vietnamese missionaries are working invoked great gratitude for the missionaries who are labouring for the Kingdom of God, and also inspired so many aspirants to think of the missions ad gentes, as many of them confessed after the Academy had finished.

The seeds have been sown, and the Salesians in Vietnam are gratefully waiting for the crop to ripen in God's good time.

Breaking news: new 'baby' born on 24th May!

FATUMACA (ITM): 25th May 2009 – The first edition of the Salesian Bulletin Tetum version 'hit the streets' in East Timor, or more precisely the winding paths around Fatumaca, on 24th May. The celebrated birth of this new Salesian family 'baby' took place in the Shrine to Mary Help of Christians at Fatumaca in the presence of the Salesian Family, especially the Past Pupils (Alumni), some members of the Government represented by some members of Parliament. Bishop Basilio do Nascimento, Bishop of Baucau Diocese in which Fatumaca is situated, was also present.

This launching of the Tetum SB is seen as an answer to what Delegates for Social Communication meeting in Seoul, Korea, recently, had agreed upon, and also as a response to the Pope's Communications Day Message.

You've heard of 'tweets' and 'Twitter', but do you know about 'tiddlers'?

ROME: 11th July 2009 – If you haven't heard of tweets and Twitter, then welcome to Planet Earth. We hope you enjoy your stay! But you can be forgiven for not knowing about tiddlers. Reminds me of the story of the Martian, who after three unsuccessful attempts to command a petrol pump he encountered near the landing spot if it could 'take me to your leader!', gave up in exasperation saying: 'and next time I speak to you, please take your finger out of your ear!'.

TiddlyWiki and Tiddlers! Let me tell you that this relatively recent 'invention', not to be confused with tiddlywinks, could offer you the possibility of at least a small revolution in the way you work, and to demonstrate this, I am offering you (just drop me a line saying 'yes please' or words to that effect), the entire Salesian Thesaurus and Glossary as a TiddlyWiki.

What is it? It is just a single html file - and that's one advantage. You can carry a single file anywhere on any digital storage medium. But it has one other advantage - because it's a wiki, you could alter (that is, write to the file yourself) any item of content. Bearing this in mind, you might like, on receiving the gift, to store it under the name it has when you receive it, then store it elsewhere and change that name to anything you want (do NOT use 'save as' from your browser - that will destroy it; instead, change the name of the file itself using the 'rename' feature in your folder).

How does it work? It looks almost magical but of course it's not. It's a simple javascript and css description inside the html file that give it its interactivity.

How could you use it? Well - the possibilities are endless. Get yourself a 'clean' TiddlyWiki (easiest way is to download one from www.tiddlywiki.com or just empty out a copy of the one I'll send you if you want it. either way you will end up with a very useful little tool for notes, 'to do' lists, entire cross-referenced books if you want.

Which is what the Glossary is, by now. Printed out it runs to more than a 100 pages. And it is much more than a Glossary. It is an up-to-date reference to the entire Salesian 'universe' of discourse, helpful not only to translators, but also useful for meditation, reflection, and a stimulus to owning our Salesian story.

Enjoy! The tiddlers and the thesauraus are gift for the Feast of st Benedict :-)

Ever faithful to Don Bosco - Mongolia's press and translation efforts

DARKHAN: 11 May 2010 – Reminiscent of our Father and Founder's own initial efforts to influence the culture of his day, confreres in Mongolia are following suit by developing a printing and translation office.

The location is the Don Bosco Parish in Darkhan, in Mongolia's north near the Russian border. Materials - text and images - are largely drawn from originals produced in Korea, and they are mostly catechetical in nature, though also have the intention of spreading information about Don Bosco and other saints. Earlier this year (February, as reported in austraLasia #2593) the first substantial work on Salesianity was published, Teresio Bosco's 'Don Bosco'. Publishers have given Fr Simon Lee permission to reproduce material of this kind.

The Press at the moment is modest: a few small printing machines, binder, cutter, and of course photocopiers and computers, but the hope is it will grow.

Staff, under the direction of Fr Simon Lee, are young men and women from Mongolia. Some are teachers of English in the university in the city, or university students taking courses in English or Korean.

The parish community comprises Fr Andrew Tin from Vietnam, Fr Simon Lee from Korea, Fr Paul Leung from China and Bro Kristoff Gniazdowski from Poland. The parish is also fortunate to have the Missionary Sisters of Charity.

'ad gentes' from a translator's perspective

MELBOURNE: 3 August 2010 – To be fair, this is not a theological reflection on missio ad gentes, or perhaps, in a roundabout and even important way it could be just that! It is a middle position I would like to state between translation ad verbum (literal, formal equivalence) and translation ad sensum (translating the idea rather than the words). I am proposing that in a global Congregation such as the SDBs, a bit more thought needs to be given, by those who produce the texts as well as by those who translate them, to what the gentes, the people, are saying.

If you want to get a snapshot of what the Salesian gentes are saying right at this moment, you need a slice of representative Salesian language in 2009-2010 from across the world. One way to do this could be to study the language of Provincial Chapters. This, after all, is the gentes speaking about themes that are common to Salesians of every race and colour. While the Rector Major and his Council will have their own specific purposes in examining the content of such documents (which come in 5 languages essentially - Italian, Spanish, English, French, Portuguese) a translator will be interested in what is his greatest responsibility - getting the source text into a faithful target text.

What 'faithful' means here of course is an open question. Fortunately the penalty for 'infidelity' now in this area doesn't compare to the decade 1536-46 when three translators met their end, one tortured and burnt at the stake in Paris for adding three extra words and a few more besides 'in the interest of clarity'; the second was strangled, then burned, in Antwerp; the third, well, he died of natural causes, but as we know, a good part of Europe would have happily seen him impaled on a stake - Martin Luther!

The snapshot I have referred to has begun, and it is already raising interesting questions. Let's take the material in English only, for now. Straightforward lexical analysis with free software (AntConc) provides all kinds of valuable information. Let me just highlight a couple of issues: In discussion on 'vocation', common to just about every Provincial Chapter, the gentes are showing a decided preference for 'vocation ministry' over 'vocation promotion', and 'vocation animation' comes in a poor third. There is good reason for the third place in English, at least, since 'animation' simply does not work for us. We all know what animazione implies in the broader and very rich history of the concept in 'italiano salesiano', but this is simply not good enough reason to go for formal equivalence, as happens too often, and translate it as 'animation'. That term in English does not readily translate very much of the rich history referred to above. It doesn't matter whether you have vocation, mission, community or any other noun in front of it. The problem remains.

As for second place, 'promotion', it is interesting how varied the gentes were in dealing with this: in terms of verbs we find foster, recruit, work for, follow up, encourage, nurture, accompany, attract, cater to, cherish, develop, discern, get, guide, invite, propose, seek - and by the way, those are listed in order of frequency; 'foster' is way out front. When it came to nominal forms, 'ministry' was first, as already indicated, but we find recruitment, discernment of, care of, animation…., and as for the person who might hold this responsibility in a Province, well, he never got called a 'Vocation Minister' but Director, Promoter, Coordinator, Animator (again in order of frequency).

These might set you thinking. There are other issues emerging: the use of 'integral' (obviously from Italian 'integrale'). Does it work? Not for the gentes it seems. They prefer 'complete', 'all-rounded', 'holistic'. In fact you could ask what 'integral' really means in English. It probably means 'complete'! There's another interesting one, 'Mission procure'. It is not the preferred option of the gentes. The preferred option seems to be 'Office'. Another (but worse than 'procure' IMHO) is 'Mission Procure Office'. It's either one or the other and since a 'procure' does not exist in English, normally (it is a verb, not a noun), 'Office' seems the right way to go.

We are a global Congregation and today the world has learned much from studies of globalisation, internationalisation, localisation and translation (which comes together as GILT). GILT would suggest that great care be given to the preparation of source texts to ensure that they are more internationalised and therefore easier to localise. A tantalising thought! We've a way to go.

A fly on the wall or a fly in the ointment?

ROME: July 13 2011 – Time to draw your attention to something you may or may not have thought a great deal about - except that the recent EAO Team Visit at Hua Hin gave it rather more consideration than might have been expected.

The first thing I want you to do is to go to Bosconet, (or if, for whatever reason, that link is not working, then go to www.bosconet.aust.com), take a quick look at the page that opens up, then come back here and read on!

The second thing I want you to do is to note the following comments extracted verbatim from the minutes of the EAO Team Visit meeting several months back:

Fr Wong: (discussion of OPP and how it is implemented around the region): "…there might be a change of terminologies, but the methods are the same".

Fr L.F.: "….the importance of terminology and translation for effective communication…Rome has to look after the whole region regarding understanding of terminology and ensure continuity from preceding (General) Chapters…" Then he goes on to raise a question about what could be meant by "the proposal of Jesus Christ" in the GC26 document.

The RM: "There are difficulties with translation and terminology. For example the OPP is a strategic plan, meaning with the resources I have, the places I am, what can I achieve in order to be more meaningful? This is different from the EPP….".

Fr Wong (further on in the discussion): "Regarding terminologies - these will always be ambiguous when there is a lack of common understanding….Terminology from the Centre must be consistent….".

The RM (Closing address this time, speaking about understanding Don Bosco today): "Good translations and clear and homogeneous terminologies are required".

So that's the 'fly on the wall' bit. I wasn't there, but I have read and re-read the entire minutes, and have merely cited elements dealing with the word 'Terminology', without delving into related terms and issues, of which there were several. But the reality is that this kind of discussion is taking place around the Congregation at every international Salesian meeting. It is a 'felt issue', but with a vague 'maybe we can do something about it' response, for the most part. The point is we can do something about it, and when we add another layer to this discussion (read further on), we simply must! What do we do about it? And here is the 'fly in the ointment' bit, a saying which almost certainly comes from Ecclesiastes 10:1: "Dead flies spoil a bowl of perfumed ointment". Applying that to Salesian Termbase, (note where the link takes you this time - and yes, same animal! and there is now A German version with at least the home page in German…) it could be expected that such a tool might not immediately receive public anointing; it could be a small detail that even causes a degree of irritation. Never mind. It is the result of five years of solid work - so far, and this is only the beginning. Take a look at the Visual Termbase, for example, and you begin to get an idea as to where this is heading.

People in the formation scene tell me this effort is already producing useful results for them - using it as a compendium of Salesian information, for example, or clearing up small doubts about the meaning of something. But it goes far deeper than this.

Have you heard talk of the 'semantic web'? The World Wide Web has had 20 years of enabling connections between millions of documents. The Church and the Salesian Congregation have played their part in these 'millions of documents'! But we have now become aware that web pages contain data as well, and this 'data' is less accessible and mostly not linked, and machines can't understand it - only humans can. In Bosconet and sdb.org we keep data in databases and occasionally 'present' it via a web page, but still, only humans can follow it. Some of that data is open and useful to the world - but not available in data form for 'meaningful' use by machines. Try looking up 'Consecrated life' on Google - a handful of documents, very little real data - and there are tons of useful data around on Consecrated Life that could make a difference to the way people understand us, and the way we understand ourselves! Try looking for a decent vocabulary of consecrated life - none available, or at least there wasn't, but there is one in the making, and Salesian Termbase lies behind it!

There is much more to come in this area of discussion. I just wanted you to be aware of what has been taking place thus far. The Termbase, by the way is in no way 'closed', and has been contributed to already by many people. It is also a wiki so in nature it is 'read-write'. Naturally, it does not do to leave it open for vandals to destroy - but interested persons are invited to play their part, if they wish. Just a matter of being in touch to organise that.

Incidentally, or maybe not incidentally - the EAO Region is actually contributing to the Congregation in quite considerable ways in this broad area - with one sixth of the world's languages in its area, 17 of them spoken regularly by members of our region, and with people involved in full-time translation of Salesian material into a number of them, we have an experience that can be shared, and fine-tuned.

A Japanese encouragement to look carefully at translation

TOKYO: 7 November 2011 – In July of this year the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan (CBCJ) formally endorsed a new, colloquial translation of the “Hail Mary” in colloquial Japanese. This new version replaces a previous colloquial version introduced in 1993.

The new prayer’s formal Japanese name is Ave Maria no Inori, or “The Ave Maria Prayer.” A first draft of this translation underwent a nationwide trial period of provisional use from December 8, 2010, to March 25, 2011. During that time, 446 people contacted the CBCJ with their opinions.

In response to some questions and concerns that formed part of this feedback, the CBCJ recently issued a guide to the revised prayer on its website. That document highlighted nine features of the translation and offered the rationale for the translations used in each.

The Latin prayer begins with the greeting, Ave Maria. Among Japanese translations of the Bible, this is translated using phrases such as omedeto (“Congratulations”) or yorokobinasai (“Be joyful”). However, there have long been objections that, in many situations when the Rosary is prayed, such as at a deathbed or during a vigil ceremony, it would be awkward to pray “congratulations” or “be of good cheer.”

The phrase Ave Maria is already well-established in people’s minds, even outside the realm of Christianity, through the names of songs and the like. Therefore, the CBCJ opted to retain the opening words of the Latin original in the Japanese, as they had for the provisional translation.

The previous official colloquial translation from 1993 used the Japanese phrase megumi afureru, (“brimming over with grace”), but has been revised in this translation to use the verb michiru, (“to be full”), as a more faithful translation of the Latin. During the provisional phase, some felt that this would not capture the fact that Mary was filled with grace by God, but this phrase was ratified as-is out of consideration for ease of recitation and with the confidence that the possibility of misunderstanding is small.

Some wondered whether the verb orareru, which is an honorific form of an alternate version of the standard Japanese verb iru, “to be,” was grammatical. However, the legitimacy of the form was confirmed with Japanese linguistic specialists and preserved in the prayer’s final text. Until now, the official Japanese Hail Mary contained the passage, Shu wa anata o erabi, shukufuku shi (“The Lord chose you and blessed you”). It has been observed that the Latin phrase in mulieribus (“among women”) was not reflected in this rendition. The older translation also shifted the grammatical subject from Mary in the Latin to the Lord God in the Japanese. Finally, in the phrase Shu wa anata o erabi (“The Lord chose you”), the verb erabu (to choose) represents and addition not present in the Latin original.

Some objections were raised to the use of onna instead of josei, which both mean “woman” but of which the latter is considered most appropriate in modern rules of Japanese usage. Nevertheless, the CBCJ decided to leave the original, onna, in the final translation. There are additional changes and comments, too many to put here, but the point of all this is a question for us as Salesians in the Region. Do we give the same attention to the crucial importance of certain Salesian terms (Preventive system, 'amorevolezza' might be two good examples) in the many languages in common use in the Region? Is it perhaps time for the many experienced and good translators around the Region to pool some thinking on this and associated issues? The CBCJ has given us good example!

Happy New Year! Korea begins Strenna 2012 'on the way to 2015'

NAE RIN: 1 January 2012 – The small Salesian community at Nae Rin, on the coast, a little south of the airport at Incheon, is only celebrating its second birthday, but building-wise it is now pretty much complete. Nae Rin is the novitiate and also a retreat centre. Four novices are due to begin their novitiate shortly, but in the meantime, the community is the setting for four of the 2012 series of Retreats for the confreres. This one is being preached by Fr Klement. Others will be preached by Bro Hilario Seo and Fr John Chong (the latter is novice director).

Given that the Rector Major has only just launched his Strenna for 2012, this particular Retreat is timely: Return to Don Bosco is its theme, and it is based very much on materials that are in preparation for this strenna, but more particularly for the 2015 birthday bash (or, more respectfully, Bicientenary!) It might be interesting to see what this group is up to, take a brief peek at how their Retreat is tackling the main theme….

The main sources in use, other than the Constitutions, naturally, are the Memoirs of the Oratory in Korean translation (completed 1998) and a booklet prepared by CISI (the Italian Salesian Provincial Conference). If readers are unaware of this latter, it could be worth their while seeking it out. It is excellent, and some parts of our Region have already begun, in some cases completed, its translation into local languages. In this case Bro Hilario has been responsible for the translation into Korean of the material prepared by Fr Aldo Giraudo, acknowledged expert in all things 'Don Bosco' (and who, incidentally, will be presenting some of his ideas at the upcoming Salesian Spirituality Days later this month in Rome).

A radical Gospel-informed lifestyle ROME: 6 April 2012 – Good Friday is an opportunity for a brief reflection on an all-embracing theme likely to occupy Salesians and the Salesian Family for the next 8 years! But first, a brief correction on yesterday's item (Fr Eli Cruz's series of studies on Salesian saints). The brief lines he places at the bottom of Fr Liberatore's poem in the first of the series (All for Love) reads: This work is dedicated to my novice master, Fr Alfred Cogliandro, himself a worthy candidate for the Cause of Sainthood. Those words are not Fr Liberatore's but Eli's. That is much clearer in the second and third volumes, where they are repeated outside the context of the poem. My apologies for the error.

Some readers may have received a notification of the GC27 central theme/topic which offered them the phrase Evangelical radicality. It would not have come from the official translators for English. We can coin many words in English with great ease: 'economer' for instance, since we are accustomed to the root 'econ-' and we have a variety of available suffixes like -ist, -er …,, but you won't find it in the OED or Webster's for that matter. Google it and you'll find mainly Salesian references. That tells us something. So 'radicality' can be coined easily enough - and found here and there in online dictionaries but rarely if ever in printed ones.

A little history and some linguistics always helps

The Italian term radicalità evangelica has gained popularity through the current Pope's use of it (his use of it when he is speaking Italian or when he is being translated into Italian), so a first 'port of call' after a dictionary would be the Vatican website to discover how things are being handled there in English. Having had something to do with translators in the Vatican from time to time, I know that their results vary, sometimes depending on the time they are allowed to do the task - if a translation has to be arrived at within a few hours, it offers little time for the very kind of study being expressed here, and the easiest solution is to aim for what linguists call calques, or loan translations, where you press a word or phrase from another language into service, keeping to its overall form. That way, radicalità evangelica can masquerade as evangelical radicality, and economo as economer. But you can only get away with that sort of thing for a while. The end result of adopting calques as the easy way out is 'vaticanese' and episodes of 'lost in translation'.

You may find an earlier Vatican reference than 1999 (I have found a 1994 reference well outside Vatican circles), but the 1999 Instrumentum Laboris for the European Bishop's Synod is available in Italian and English on the Vatican site, where in no. 54, it speaks of "l'amore reciprico vissuto con radicalità evangelica". The English version translates this as: "love for one another, lived as the Gospel teaches", and here one notes that the group responsible for the traslation (it was a group) stood back a bit from the typically abstract form that characterises Italian. But surprise, surprise, and pleasantly so, I discovered that the 'peritus' on the Salesian side who worked as part of the group preparing this translation, was none other than the official current Salesian translator for English in Rome.

Let's move onto 2001, and Pope John Paul's Novo Millennio Ineunte, no. 51: "…alcuni aspetti della radicalità evangelica…", translated this time (not by the same translators) as "certain aspects of the Gospel's radical message". We have two examples, thus far, of the way English best handles radicalità and its ilk (by which I mean many -ità type nouns): one by avoiding the term altogether and taking other paths to its underlying meaning, the other by turning it into an adjective and going on from there.

By the time we get to Pope Benedict, who has frequently used the Italian radicalità evangelica in reference to Catholic Action (siate profeti di radicalità evangelica), as well as to priesthood and religious life (the latter to be found in his address to young women religious in Madrid at WYD), official Vatican translations have Gospel radicalism as their regular translation of the term. But this raised a number of questions even in Italian. The Messaggero di S. Antonio (Padova), a well-respected Catholic Italian magazine, queried the use of radicalismo evangelico as a paraphrase of radicalità evangelica, and while we can't simply transfer that discussion to English, it might suggest that Gospel radicalism does run into difficulties in the current climate of religious intolerance and certain political debates, be they in Europe or elsewhere. It is used, I find, in the Decree recognising the Neocatechetical Way as it appears in English translation (also 2008).

With all this in mind, the version of the Rector Major's letter of invitation (not the convocation letter - that is yet to come) for GC27 as found on sdb.org, renders "Testimoni della radicalità evangelica" as "Witnesses to a radical Gospel-informed lifestyle". This is understood more clearly reading the whole letter which is at pains to point out that this all-embracing idea is to be seen as "a practical formulation of Don Bosco's plan of life".

As these letters will undoubtedly be translated into the 17 languages of our Region, or at least into six or seven of them, would it be possible, please, to ask that you send me the translated version (for SDL)? You will necessarily be working from the official Italian original, not from the English, and other languages will have other issues than those which are important to English. I have just finished reading a lengthy but informative discussion of 'Strategies and Problems in Japanese Translation of Christian Terminology' (Japan Mission Journal). That's one step before we even get to Salesian terminology!

To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan: "The translator's lot is not an easy one".

Spiritual Sinology: A Chinese Gem

BEIJING-ROME: Every once in a while along life's journey, a true little gem of scholarship comes our way. Such is the case of Sinologia Spirituale, Lettere (immaginarie) dal medioevo ai tempi nostri di 50 missionari che amarono la Cina, by Michele Ferrero, or in English, Spiritual Sinology, (imaginary) letters, from the Middle Ages until the present day, by 50 missionaries who loved China.

Michele Ferrero is Professor of Latin and Western Classics at Beijing Foreign Studies University as part of an exchange program between this university and the UPS, Rome. He is also a researcher at the BFSU, involved especially in translation of early Western Sinology texts, many of them written in Latin. Readers may well know Michele Ferrero, or have been taught by him (e.g. at Ratisbonne). He has dedicated himself to our Region for a good number of years now.

The work, currently in polished Italian but already with an English translation under way, was published by LAS on the Feast of Sts Louis Versiglia and Callistus Caravario this year. As soon as the English translation is complete, we will be the first to let you know.

It is an engaging, indeed alluring read. As Professor Ferrero points out in his brief intro, the lives and stories of these men and women are authentic. He has read and translated their real letters but has chosen, in each case, to write what could have been the 'last' letter each had ever written. This clever epistolary literary device enables him to recapitulate their life story in their own 'first person' style, with the reader as implicit third person, although the addressee is someone else. It is a finely-balanced play between public and private - and it works, not just because of the device, but because it is clearly in the hands of an expert sinologue, Michele Ferrero himself, who is able to meld his own reflections with those of his subjects. In a brief note to austraLasia, he wondered: "Surely a more spiritual vision of China is needed, but surely, too, there are better books around". Are there? This one is very special.

It should be no surprise, given the history of Christianity in China, that there are a good number of Jesuits amongst the selected missionaries, and a fair smattering of Italians too, but the selection overall is even-handed: men and women, Catholics and Protestants, individuals and couples from many countries, who have all loved Christ and loved China.

No surprise, either, that there is 'Un sinologo salesiano santo', a Salesian Saint and sinologue in the final section, which deals with post-imperial (after 1911) China. If you can read Italian, it would be worth your while getting hold of a copy of this 219 page 'saggio', retailing at €14. If you need a copy in English, you may not have to wait too long!

Two sets of useful resources

ROME: 25 September 2012 – As promised, you can now access two sets of resources that may be of some value to some people during this second year of Bicentneary preparations focusing on Don Bosco's Pedagogy. One of these resources is available in English, the other in Italian.

The life of Luigi Comollo, written by Don Bosco, is now available in English translation. If you are using Firefox as your browser, you can easily add an epub reader addon and then Comollo's life is available to read online as an ebook. If you do not have the addon or you use another browser, you could still read the epub in an e-reader.

If you want a hard copy in Word you can download it from here. That URL might change over the next 24 hours since we are doing some additional work on SDL at the moment.

The Life of Young Luigi Comollo is of particular interest since it was written by the young Don Bosco in 1844, when he was just a young priest, and he chose to rewrite it in 1884 towards the end of his life, so it brackets the other three 'Lives' and may also help interpret many things about Don Bosco's pedagogical approach. The translator has tried to keep a balance between Don Bosco's style and the needs of today's reader. Hopefully he has succeeded!

The other item promised is only in Italian and not likely to find translation into English, but if the Italian texts are of some value, then feel free. They are available from donboscoland.it at the following URL The item you would be interested in is 'Educare come Don Bosco' and it is a set of resources (including three Lectio Divina pieces one of which has been prepared by Fr Frank Moloney) which focus on monthly topics to do with Don Bosco and his pedagogy, in keeping with the Strenna.

The beginnings of the Oratory: Fragments and documents

VALDOCCO: 25 October 2012 – While it is all part of an ongoing translation process regarded as absolutely essential in this period when we are approaching the Bicentenary of Don Bosco's birth, the pages you can now have access to in English can, in some ways, stand alone as a valuable collection put into English for the first time.

We are talking about Part 1 of Braido's Don Bosco the Educator, where he collects and comments (in one place with the help of Antonio Ferreira da Silva) on 'fragments and documents' regarding the early days of the Oratory before and after Don Bosco had been able to set up at Valdocco.

Some bits and pieces of these documents already existed in English translation - the Lenti seven volume series had one or two, and the Rattazzi-Bosco conversation existed in digested form (as translated by Fr Pat Laws some years back but not, it turns out, the complete document).

So what do we have here? The preface to Don Bosco's Church History (1845), along with a review that appeared at the time of publication; DB's letter to Michael B. Cavour asking for permission to transfer to Valdocco - and Cavour's positive response; a letter to a local newspaper indicating some early positive reactions to the new Oratory; the introductory part to the Companion of Youth (1847 edition); preface to DB's Bible History (1847) and as adjusted (the preface) in the 1853 edition; a review of the Bible History; an 1849 article in the Catholic paper, L'Armonia, on the Oratory; and a similar article in Il Conciliatore Torinese - of particular interest is the fact that this article was written in 1849 by a certain Lorenzo Gastaldi when he was a newspaper editor - it wasn't until 1871 that he became Archbishop of Turin! In the same newspaper and the same year (so same author?) a review of DB's work on the metric system 'made simple'; again in 1849 an article on the Oratory in a teachers' journal; the letter DB wrote to King Victor Emmanuel seeking financial aid (which he received), and a report from the Treasurer General of the Realm backing the petition; DB's (and other petitioners') appeal to the Royal Institute for the Education of the Destitute for funds; a report (favourable) on Don Bosco's appeal for public (government) funds, along with other petitioners; Don Bosco's request to run his first lottery where he boldly asks a city authority not only to give permission but to throw in some items as prizes; the conversation with Urban Rattazzi.

It makes a fine collection of primary sources to have access to, along with the detailed footnotes and line-by-line commentaries on certain documents.

The pages, which are now in fact added to the earlier translated 'introduction' by Braido to his Don Bosco, Educatore, mean that about a quarter of this long and detailed work is now in English.

Just a technical note: you should take the pdf version if you want all the footnotes and line-numbering. The extracted text-only version will not give you those details.

If for any reason you cannot access the hyperlink above, just got to SDL, English collection and look for Braido under 'Creator'.

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

Documents and Writings from the Last Five Years (1883-1887)

ROME: 17 February 2103 – The fourth and final section of Peter Braido's 'Don Bosco, Educatore' (third and most recent edition, 1997) is now in English translation and is available in pdf format from SDL (cf. link above, or go to the English collection of SDL and look up Titles - Don Bosco, Educator, Documents and Writings from the Last Five Years (1883-1887).

Given not only that this final section was the longest of all (106 pages), that it contained a number of diagrams and very many pages of critical apparatus, all of which has been translated and adapted (line numbering for texts obviously different from the original printed Italian text), this was something of a nightmare translation and took time! But the good news is that we now have the full text for this particular edition of Braido's - which includes the work of da Silva Ferreria, Motto and Prellezo as well.

The Fourth section contains:

• the circular letter attributed to Don Bosco on punishments (Prellezzo)

• the social and pedagogical nature of the preventive system (Braido, a variety of shorter texts)

• the two letters from Rome (Braido - many people think there was only one, and that Don Bosco wrote it. There were at least two and just to what extent Don Bosco 'wrote it' is explored in detail in this long and fascinating excursus)

• the Memoirs from 1841 to 1884-5-6 (Motto. Parts of this are cited in the appendix to the Constitutions, but a full translation of it has never been available in English until now).

• three letters to Salesians in America (Motto, who claims that it is in these that we begin to see Don Bosco developing the preventive system into a spiritual and religious way of life for his Salesians.

Clearly this fourth section, but not to overlook the material already available in the three sections earlier posted to SDL, is of very special value in a year when we are focusing on Don Bosco's pedagogy.

Just note that while there has been an effort to eliminate typos or other small errors, this is not a fully-proofed, ready-for-print edition as yet. That will come when and if someone decides it is worth printing. In the meantime it is important that the substance of these studies is available to those who want and need it.

Happy reading.

ps: thanks to the collaboration of Fr Mike Mendl, the other major item now in translation (Braido's Prevention, not Repression), is now available on SDL (search for it under that title in the English collection or under author) in a proofed edition

by pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpvpvzk kkkkk bsch

NOT-BABEL: 30 September 2013 – 30 September is International Translation Day, and while we might take it for granted that this is the feast of the patron saint of translators, translation is obviously not just a 'Christian' event, so it is remarkable that an 'international' day (since 1953) is still happy to have Christian leanings. St Jerome is famous not only for the 'Vulgate' but also because he wrote down his theory of translation. In his Letter to Pammachius on the Best Method of Translating, he put it this way:

Not only do I admit, but I proclaim at the top of my voice, that in translating from Greek, except from Sacred Scripture, where even the order of the words is of God’s doing [in fact, he says 'is a mystery'], I have not translated word for word, but sense for sense.

The truth of that final axiom (leaving aside the earlier part!) is brilliantly displayed in one translator's way of tackling a very difficult pun in French, a humorous visiting card with the words: Adolf Hitler/Fourrer written on it. The joke is that Fourrer (furrier) is very close to the French for Führer. The clever translator got that into English this way: Adolf Hitler/German Lieder. That is sense-to-sense rather than word-for-word at its best! Or if you prefer to go in the other direction, this time from English to Italian, I know of an author who described a girl as “a va-va-voom gorgeous blonde”. A little time around an oratory or on a Roman street could suggest that as “una bionda da urlo" – a blonde to scream for, youthful slang for what might draw a whistle of appreciation! But let's get back on track…

Could we try the Archangel Gabriel?

There is no Nobel prize for translation, so it looks like sainthood is the highest reward…or higher still? Let's suggest the Archangel Gabriel as a patron for translation. For a start, Gabriel also appeals to the Jewish tradition (interpreted the prophet Daniel) and the Islamic (gave the Qur'an to Muhammed), so is arguably more international than Jerome.

You are beloved

We have no theory of translation from Gabriel (that I know of) but we have his translation/interpretation/messaging praxis to learn from: to begin with he enthusiastically conveys God’s approval. “You are beloved,” he assures Daniel more than once (9:23; 10:11,19), and with a gentle touch, strengthens the trembling human to stand before his angelic glory and receive the insight he seeks. So maybe a hint to a translator's prayer for insight going on here?

Suffer your mistakes

When you are hard at work translating, you understandably want to question the meaning of words - like Zechariah, remember, the future father of John the Baptist: “How shall I know this?” (in reference to the priestly prophecy). It may sound like a reasonable question (Luke 1:18), but intimate association with the Searcher of Minds and Hearts enables Gabriel to spot the unbelief that motivated the questioner. Gabriel pronounces a punishment that provides an opportunity for conversion: “You will be speechless and unable to talk until the day these things take place” (Luke 1:20). Translators don't know it all, as it happens. They make mistakes. They need conversion!

Hail, favoured one!

They need a bit of praise too. Consider Gabriel’s visit to Mary. Mary reflects God's will perfectly, and Gabriel affirms it: Awesome! “Hail, favoured one!”, he translates God's mind as (Luke 1:28). One might also suspect that he has a good notion Mary will end up 'Queen of Angels', so it doesn't hurt to offer some praise!

Angels, like translators, never retire

And don't forget that like angels, translators never retire, so they may need something for flagging energy. Gabriel doesn't get a guernsey at the story of Bethlehem, but after all his translation and interpretation service to divine diplomacy he could hardly be left out of the culminating moment and was possibly leading the chorus of heavenly hosts as they appeared over sleeping sheep and watchful shepherds - who are then energised; they become the first evangelists in Luke's Gospel. Translators, be energised!

A joyful mystery indeed…

Yes, maybe translation comes under 'A' for Annunciation, a joyful mystery, rather than 'B' for Babel the sorrowful and disheartening 'mystery of many tongues'. And maybe Salesians could look upon translation as a joyful task, even a prayerful one, where we are reminded of God more than Google. And if Gabriel was God's first minister, maybe we could consider this work of interpreting God's message as a clear sign that translation is an angelic ministry. …and fun

Oh, and translation can also be fun! Put the following into Google translate (from any language to any language) and press the 'listen' icon:

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpvpvzk kkkkk bsch

Then there's always the phrasebook scene in Monty Python's Flying Circus!

austraLasia #3245

Seven volume series on Don Bosco in Korean

SEOUL: 16 July 2013 – It has been a three year labour of love by a former Salesian and the sister of a Salesian, but it means that the Korea Province is the first Province in the world to ensure that all seven volumes of Fr Arthur Lenti's monumental series on Don Bosco, 'History and Spirit', are now available to confreres in Korea in their own language.

With the seventh and last volume in hand, Fr Stephen Nam, Provincial in Korea thanked the many people involved in translation and publication of the series, saying that now, local Salesians have a magnificent and abundant amount of material "to discover our origins and return to Don Bosco". He said he was sure that "this series is a great gift for us in preparing for the bicentenary, so let's suggest it and present it to people who want to know about and imitate Don Bosco".

Five of the series, including this final one, were translated by Joseph Kang, a former Salesian and now retired teacher of English from Incheon, where he taught at the Catholic Secondary school there. "I am really happy to have translated this wonderful work of Fr Lenti's", he said. "I have taken great pride in belonging to the Salesian Family and starting out from Don Bosco's spirit. The translator for the other two volumes, Mrs Teresa Lee, is a sister of Fr Raphael Lee, parish priest in Seoul. She has collaborated in translation tasks with the Salesians now for over twenty years.

Don Bosco Media, the Salesian Publishers in Seoul managed under the leadership of Bro Hilario Seo, has published 500 copies of this final volume. It is a hardcover edition, as are four other of the volumes. The first three were originally paperback editions but the plan is to give this work the quality that it its due and reprint the first three as hardcover editions as well. The full hardcover set is due to be published by January 31st 2014.

At 567 pages and at a special price of 17,500 Won (approx 15.16 USD) or 30% discount for Salesian family members, this is a good buy for Korean readers.

The 'Cenno storico' or Historical Outline

11 August 2013 – A document no Salesian would want to miss - but only now available in English with a complete set of notes as prepared by Fr Pietro Braido in his Don Bosco the Educator, the complete and revised English translation of which is also available. We are speaking of the Cenno storico, or Historical Outline, the first and most interesting testimony of Don Bosco's on the work that became the Oratory at Valdocco and the Salesian Congregation. Here is how it begins:

This Oratory, a gathering of young people on Sundays and holy days, began in the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. For many years during the summertime, the Rev. Fr. [Joseph] Caffasso used to teach catechism every Sunday to bricklayers’ boys in a little room attached to the sacristy of the aforementioned church. The heavy workload this priest had taken on caused him to interrupt this work, which he loved so much. I took it up towards the end of 1841, and I began by gathering in that same place two young adults who were in grave need of religious instruction. These were joined by others, and during 1842 the number went up to twenty, and sometimes twenty-five.

What do we notice? Here, and as this 11 page document continues, the work of the oratories is presented as the work of several clergy and also lay people from Turin. It is not yet a 'Salesian' work. Notice too, no mention of Bartholomew Garelli: it all began, according to this testimony, with 'two young adults…in grave need of religious instruction'.

There are many little surprises in store as you read through this document. You recognise the fact immediately that Don Bosco went back to it many years later when he was putting his Memoirs of the Oratory together, but there are many details not included in the latter: we discover, for example that a certain Savio Ascanio was the first person in the Oratory to receive the clerical habit (1848). In fact he received that at Cottolengo House - he was supposed to be at the diocesan seminary but it was closed so Don Bosco took him in. He helped Don Bosco but did not become a Salesian, though he did become a priest and was Rector at The Refuge. The Memoirs of the Oratory rightly point us to another clerical investiture of importance - Rua - a few years later.

So hopefully your appetite has been whetted. You have two choices. You can download the brief document in its English translation (it also includes some 70 footnotes by Braido), or you can download the complete PDF copy of Don Bosco the Educator, from which it is taken.

Additional single original documents now in English have been added to those placed in SDL last week: the prefaces to Don Bosco's Sacra storia (Bible History), Storia ecclesiastica, and Storia d'Italia (History of Italy); his introduction to The Companion of Youth, the Draft Regulations of the Oratory (intro only), and several interesting letters: one to King Victor Emmanuel II asking for financial support, another to Marquis Michele Benso Cavour, and a Circular sent out about his first Lottery (by a group of 'Promoters', but clearly written by Don Bosco himself).

TURIN: 13 December 2013 – Ceria's 1946 classic, Don Bosco With God, comes back into the limelight with the 3rd and final year of preparation for the Bicentenary. A 2008 English edition, translated by Fr Michael Smyth and produced by St Paul Communications, was published in Nairobi and has almost certainly made its way into most English-speaking Salesian communities, but requests often come in for a digital version of this text. There has been a digital text floating around, a 1942 translation of the original 1930 and first edition by Ceria. But it was a scanned copy of what was possibly an Indian-published version, and had many scanning errors, making it at times difficult and often annoying to attempt to read.

There is now a corrected pdf copy of this 1942 translation available in SDL, so feel free to take a copy.

The translation is generally good and where it went wrong, such as the famous 'genial' for 'geniale' or 'whisper' for what we now always know as 'Word in the ear' and similar, that too has now been corrected, so overall the 1942 translation, while not as fluent as Michael Smyth's (and we are unlikley to be able to have that in digital form since it would be with St Paul's Communication and not 'in-house') is a worthy one.

Just as a reminder to the reader of what this item is all about, I quote from parts of the presentation of the 2008 edition by Fr Joaquim D'Souza, since the comments are also relevant in this case:

The author, Eugenio Ceria (1870-1957) is well known in Salesian circles for having published, together with Giovanni Battista Lemoyne, the monumental nineteen-volume work, The Biographical Memoirs of St John Bosco. In 1929, Fr Ceria was appointed to take up and complete the work interrupted with the death of Fr Lemoyne in 1916. In the Preface to Don Bosco with God, dated 31 January 1946, Ceria states that the idea for the book came to him at the time of the beatification of Don Bosco in 1929. To quote his words (pp.15-16):

“[Don Bosco’s] contemporaries were so taken up in admiration of his immense activity and various triumphs that they overlooked the fact that all his glory came from within – omnis gloria eius ab intus. Even the generation that came after his death preferred to dwell on the works of Don Bosco without paying much attention to the animating principle, that which has always been the secret of the saints: the spirit of prayer and union with God”

This book, therefore, was meant to correct the rather one-sided perception of Don Bosco’s true greatness by attempting as it were, “to lift the hem of the veil that covered his inner life”. Its publication in 1930 was met immediately with success. It is said that Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, the Archbishop of Milan, on reading the book, remarked, “Finally, the Salesians have begun to understand Don Bosco!”

The central quote from Ceria himself about the spirit of prayer and union with God, is precisely what the 3rd year of preparation for the Bicentenary, focusing on Don Bosco's spirituality, is all about. It is a good indication, then, that this text will be very useful indeed for the coming year.

Hopefully tomorrow we can have something to say about a second item along these lines which just arrived today.

Salesian Sources in English

ROME: 11 March 2014 – In his presentation (written) of the 1st volume of the 'Fonti salesiane' or Salesian Sources, a work presented last week to GC27, the RM has this to say:

"This first volume, in Italian and the languages it will be translated into, is entrusted to every Salesian. Each of us, beginning from our initial formation, should have a personal copy of it. It should be like a “vademecum” or handbook, essential for knowledge of Don Bosco and thus for loving, imitating, and calling upon our dear Father. Without love there is no desire to get to know him, but without this knowledge we will not grow in love. It is my special wish that there will be a serious and systematic study of these Salesian sources during our initial formation."

So where do we go from here?.

In fact the translation of this work into English has been in progress for quite some time, and a good part of the volume is already available.

All told the Italian edition has some 300 plus documents and runs to more than 1300 pages (the above pic gives one an idea of its thickness).

Whatever is eventually done about a printed version of this in English is not as important, perhaps, as ensuring that the documents themselves are made available as soon as possible.

With this in mind, a process has already been set in place that will enable the interested reader which, if one is to take the RM's words above literally, would be all of us, to access the growing list of this material available in English. It is being placed in the English collection on SDL, the Salesian Digital Library, as and when it becomes available.

There are two possibilities here:

(1) if you wish to have the entire work in one file, then it is available here to the point of completion in English translation. If you were searching for that without the link, then you would go to the English collection, search under the 'subjects' tab for 'Salesian Sources (under 'S' in the horizontal alphabetical bar you will be confronted with), and select the 'Salesian_sources' item with (1) file in it. This will be constantly updated on a weekly basis so expect it to grow!

(2) if you want individual documents, then you have several ways you can find them. Using precisely the same search path, you select the second item saying 'Salesian_{sourcesindividualitems'} (which currently has 20 items in it) and you will find them listed. had you searched under the titles tab for either Fonti salesiane or Salesian Sources you would also have found these. If you are looking for a precise document, know its title (as it would be in English) or the year it was written then the titles and dates tab respectively would find these items for you.

Just 20 out of 300 and more documents? In fact no. Probably about 150 of these 300 are already in English, but they now need to be revised and adjusted to fit into the format and proper place allotted them in the Fonti salesiane. You can expect this to be happening constantly, so on any week in the future, using the search processes indicated above, you will find more documents.

A good start might well be to take the General Introduction (which is one of the separately listed items also and could be found here).

Happy reading.

Now, this is also an appeal. Even at the risk of doubling up, there is the strong possibility that some of you for whatever reasons at all, have previously needed and therefore translated or had translated one or other document of Don Bosco's (let's leave the MO and the Lives out of this - of course we have all those, and in spades!). Could you send such to me at one of the usual austraLasia addresses?

Of course, it can save work, but it is also a valuable form of international cooperation that meets the kind of situation we are now in as a Congregation, and a similar appeal has already turned up some documents that might not otherwise have been discovered to have already been translated. As I say, even if there is doubling up, there is always a 'delete' button!

The Trend and the Translation

ROME: 16 March 2014 – Maybe let the three pics above sum it up for us at one level:

(1) The deeper question is where the Word of God is leading this Chapter.

(2) If you wanted to ask "What's the score?" then the answer would be focusing on the Guil…er, …Juridical commission (or Committee as it is also called in some parts of the English-speaking world).

(3) And there were calmer moments too - a BBQ - EAO have decided to let their hair down. Sunday sees a Florence option just as the previous week there was a Naples option.

(4) And finally - while not part of Chapter discussion directly (though it has already cropped up indirectly and could have tripped people up badly) is a post-Chapter issue - the English translation of our Constitutions and Regulations. For reasons adduced below, certainly worth some consideration. You have a more detailed possibility offered, if you wish to read up on this.

THE TREND Fairly clearly, the trend has been not to fiddle too much with the Constitutions and Regulations. This is the straw vote, flying-a-kite, 'trend' phase, so let's take a look at the week's trends in this regard:

Sector Councillors: the two that came up for discussion were the Missions and the Communications Councillors and their roles - the proposals were that both be eliminated from the General Council, the former being 'absorbed' by other Councillors' roles and the latter being moved sideways (but out) into a Secretariat. The respective Constitutions (137, 138) would be 'suppressed' (that was the word used). Both kites came crashing down, meaning the proposals. Missions did eventually go to a straw vote and on the basis of that it would stay. Communications likewise. In the upshot, both were mixed votes but surprisingly there was an even more resounding vote for Communications that might have originally been expected.

Regional Councillors: the proposal was that, despite suggestions to the contrary, the current description of tasks (C. 140) is adequate. Proposal resoundingly accepted.

Election of the Rector Major: the proposal was to leave procedures as is. C. 141 Resoundingly accepted.

Election of the Vicar: recall the suggestion that there be three names put up from which the RM could choose? The Juridical Commission instead proposed we don't fiddle with (not quite their words) C. 141 again. Resoundingly accepted.

Length of terms of office: The proposal was that the current 6 year terms are appropriate - accepted. C. 128 and 142

RM can only be re-elected for one consecutive term: C. 142. Likewise left as is.

Vicar, Sector Councillors, Regional Councillors: re-election for only one consecutive term in the same role is possible. Accepted.

General Council: to comprise (other than the RM), Vicar, Sector Councillors, Regional Councillors. C.133. Accepted. Leave as is.

There might be more. Have I missed one? Vicar and SF? But the trend is very clear - the Constitutions and Regulations, at least at this point, are left largely untouched. There is also a practical side to this - any changes to the C&R require permission from the Holy See. That takes time!

The Translation

There is a lot of translation work going on within and for the General Chapter - people in the 'cubicles' translating (interpreting is probably the better word) simultaneously, people working at night to ensure some translation 'pointers' added into minutes to ease the task for non-Italian language English speakers, documents worked on during the day in other parts of the world (while it is night time in Italy) to be ready for the morrow in Rome at 9.00 a.m. Most of this works 'fluently' as one would expect of translation. Occasional hiccups (email is notoriously unreliable at times), but by and large - we get there, and on time!

However, there is another issue which is worth raising here, because you can immediately see the relevance of it - the sector/department distinction was pretty central to the earnest discussion that has gone on over sector representation in the General Council, and we already know that the English translation of C. 133 is plain wrong! The Italian says "I consiglieri incaricati di settori speciali sono: …" and the English says "The councillors in charge of special departments are: …". It is a fundamental error, as discussion this week has shown up.

Let's put it this issue in context

• it has been 40 years (6 general Chapters worth) since the translation of the Constitutions and Regulations have been touched. Those GCs have added, adjusted, subtracted admittedly few items, but they have done all three things.

• What Don Bosco and what the Special General Chapter meant by certain terms is something that we now have a much better grasp of due to the 'historical sense', as the RM puts it, that has grown over recent decades.

• Language and culture has changed, as it inevitably does. But we still have the translation of 40 years ago.

These are just three (there would be more) very good reasons for a new translation.

What follows below is a translator's point of view - based on solid enough translation principles. It does not claim to enter into discussion at a charismatic or juridical level which is the competence of others. But the 'translation platform' too, ought be part of discussion.

We could sum up the levels of the translation issue along these lines:

i) Translation of juridical texts usually requires more literal and less 'interpretative' translation. The SDB Constitutions have been widely recognised as an outstanding example of a juridical text in less-than-juridical language. This is excellent for warm and inspiring reading; it is also a translation trap. Are there cases where the English 'interprets' the Italian a little too freely, or downright incorrectly? (You have one answer above already in C. 133)

ii) One of the most difficult areas to deal with in translation is not exactly the lexical or syntactic, but the so-called discourse level, how things are said and understood in a particular culture. But the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic all have an effect on that. Can we point to any problems here in the C&R in English?

iii) Then there's perhaps one of the lowest and least important levels, but one that tends to annoy people most because it is so obvious: it's more at the levels we instinctively recognise - consistent spelling, use of punctuation (which inevitably differs between Italian and English), shifts in sensitivities. Are there cases in the current C&R in English in this, let's call it 'orthographic' area?

Interpretation

Take the first of these - interpretation, which may manifest through choice of words (lexical) or by adding or subtracting. So, continuing with C. 133 you will notice it talks about 'youth apostolate'. We would most likely use the term 'youth ministry' today. Elsewhere you will even find 'youth pastoral', which is by now a deprecated term - it was really always deprecated! It does not make sense, since it is more or less dragged in from 'pastorale giovanile' and 'pastoral' made into a noun that would not be widely recognised as meaning anything other than a work of literature idealising country life.

But there are more serious examples. GC26 pointed to a dangerously defective translation of C. 187 which omits the word 'permanente=ongoing, constant …' and translates 'capitalizzazione fruttifera' as 'interest-bearing investment'. Maybe it should have at least been 'capital investment' rather than generalised investment.

We have the excellent study today by Fr Arthur Lenti on what Don Bosco meant by 'i più poveri', and since it crops up so frequently in our language (already several times in GC27), how we interpret that is pretty important - not as a categorising feature, according to Lenti, but as a quantifying one. In English, C. 2 has it as just 'those who are poor'. C. 26 has it as 'those who are poorer'. Is one worse than the other?

C. 33 raises a set of discourse issues around terms like 'ambienti popolari' and 'giovani poveri'. Here too, today we have a better appreciation of what these terms meant for Don Bosco that may raise questions for how they have been translated in English, as 'economically depressed areas' and 'poor youth' (the Italian is more precise and 'real', the English more abstract in this latter case). But, staying with C. 33 which is long and complex as an article, there is another issue. The first para in Italian is two sentences, and three in English. That's fair enough - often is the case that Italian sentences are longer, more complex. But another factor creeps in - the focus changes in the English. The grammatical structure in Italian places focus on 'education', while in English it becomes 'collaboration'. This is a discourse issue.

Or take C. 36 where the Italian speaks of 'Con Cristo nell'ascolto della Parola' and English says 'the encounter with Christ in the Word'. There could be an argument, in the light of the central place of the Word, or better, listening to the Word (Lectio divina etc.) so much emphasised today, for this notion of 'listening to the Word' to be in the English text, rather than just encountering Christ in the Word.

There are several other cases along these lines. The Italian is happy to speak of Francis de Sales' humanism (C. 17) while English feels the need to add that it is optimistic humanism.

Shifts in sensitivity

There are many obvious examples. In the 23rd General Chapter I recall being laughed at when suggesting that in some parts of the world 'saying man to also embrace woman' is unacceptable (well, you know what I mean; in other words the gender-sensitive language issue). Not even Italy would laugh at that one any more! And yet our constitutional text is full or reference to 'man' when it could use a more generic term, or 'brothers' when it is not only confreres we are referring to.

Then there's spelling and other orthographic issues. The question here would be partly one of consistency. 'Labour' suggests that the spelling adopted will be British, so one would expect to find that adhered to throughout. Not so. -ize and -ise are both acceptable in British English but it is better to adopt one or the other and stick with it. Not so in our case.

Capitalisation is another question. There are pretty much widely accepted rules on this across the range of 'Englishes' in the world. It is standard practice that adjectives, adverbs or verbs which derive from a proper noun are capitalised. 'Christian' and 'Salesian' are proper nouns (and also an adjective form). The C&R is quite inconsistent in this regard, often employing 'christian' and 'salesian'.

Some of these issues are up for discussion - the important thing would be to have this discussion at some stage (probably not at the Chapter, but generated by the Chapter).

This end up!

ROME: 21 March 2014 – Apart from the 'box' pic nicely encapsulating (literally!) what we Salesians are all about, it raises another issue. Translation. Of course 'non capovolgere' in English is 'This end up'. What else could it be?

'Mystics in the Spirit' had to face this issue on Thursday - partly because it raised the question of translating the Salesian sources, partly because of the problem suggested in the second pic! And maybe, just maybe, the problem is really inherent to a term like 'Mystics', anyway.

Meanwhile a few of the earlier 'straw' proposals firm up. A few more are added - Will Europe stay at 3 or reduce to 2?

Youth Ministry Framework - maybe the first ever document at this level to go into language versions such as 2 x Spanish and 2 x Portuguese. Just 1 x English - I mean, let's face it, we all speak the same language :-) and,

Eye halve a spelling chequer

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marques four my revue

Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

– Sauce unknown

Which end up for the Chapter document?

The desire to get a document in some sort of shape before the coming week focuses on elections, is progressing - but might have hit a small speedbump, and people seem to have two ways of handling speedbumps. Most slow down, some just go faster - they sort of don't notice the bump that way, but God only knows what it's doing to your set of wheels - you could simply 'capovolgere'! One suspects (hopes) the Chapter will slow down.

You see, they are now looking more closely at the first drafts of the more or less 'complete' item covering Listening-Interpretation-Way forward. Mystics in the Spirit (1st core topic) was a hard one to start with, when you think about it, because it's not an easy topic to get a handle on, and how do you make the 'Way forward' really hit home in concrete terms? So the debate is on - and be it interventions in the auditorium or comments from commissions - translation as an issue is coming up from time to time, not just into English but into other languages and their versions (as the YM Framework to be presented today (Friday) highlights nicely.

There is a recommendation in the 'Way forward' in topic 1 which, if it survives discussion, will say "See to the translation of Salesian sources into various languages", this being thought essential if we are to understand DB the mystic etc. etc. and how do you describe DB the mystic? An early draft thought a comment on DB the mystic by Ceria would help - but maybe not?

One speaker weighed in on this during the 5 minute interventions. He spoke in English and there might have been a moment of mystery (sometimes the dominant language speakers feel exempt from using the headphones, and were the English-into-other-languages ready anyway? He usually speaks in Italian!). What he was saying seemed important, but you have to understand him to be sure of that!

What was he saying? He pointed to translation not so much as a technical problem but a charismatic one. He pointed out how it's easy enough to ask for this but getting stuff into our various languages has been and remains one of our great challenges.

He cited examples (mistranslations of the Constitutions in English; A Missioni Don Bosco video that said DB was a Protestant Pastor! Lenti's masterpiece is in Spanish but not yet in Italian! The current 'Fonti salesiane' translations into Spanish appear to be leaving out whole paragraphs …)

But he did not leave it at a problem. He made some quite direct proposals, such as: develop appropriate tools or use the ones already existing and further develop those (he cited Salesian Termbase, for example, as such a helpful tool for the EN-IT pair). He also asked that there be a reference group set up that translators of Salesian source material could have easy access to, to resolve difficulties.

Stirring words!

12 April 2014 – Just a word about this material in particular - the translations of written material (the kind of thing you have links to above) have largely been done in bits and pieces as they came through. In some cases (the Chapter Document, for example), they went through many - and we many many - versions, revisions and the like, all based on the 'official' 'editio tipica' which under current custom is Italian. The Rector Major has introduced a new factor into all of this - for the moment, at least, he uses Spanish to ensure he gets his message through - from the heart and mind that is best expressed for him, as it is for all of us, in his native language. Good on yer mate! (Does that need translation? I doubt it!).

All of the above means that the documents (most of which have been translated under understandable pressure) are in English, are in good English by and large, but will need to be reviewed, 'harmonised' between one and the other, and so on and so on. That is a post-chapter event. Just bear that in mind. If you see something that hits you in the face immediately as 'odd' (I'm talking about translation of these documents, of course!) could you pass that on please? Of course, these then have to be checked back against the 'official' originals, but comments of the kind will be taken kindly and where possible, integrated.

Cooperators EAO/R Elect World Councillor

Salesian Sources now complete

26 April 2014 – Two items of good news:

The 1st of 11 regional congresses for the Salesian Cooperators (ACS) has now wound up in the Philippines. Philip Yu has been elected as World Councillor. This will be Philip's second run at this task.

The translation of Salesian Sources Volume 1 (Fonti salesiane) is now complete. It will of course be printed, but digital copy of the Introduction and four parts is available for whomsoever should want the entire effort in digital format.