Pope’s message is often lost in translation

Jan 15, 2015

The days when Latin was the official language at the Vatican are long since past. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council multilingualism has more and more become a standard feature of ecclesiastical Rome. This is true of the papal liturgies at St Peter’s and even more so in the offices of the universal Church’s central bureaucracy, the Roman Curia.

But if Vatican officials have conceded that Latin is no longer the universal language, they have embraced modern day Italian as the de facto lingua franca of ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Pope Francis made that all but official last October when he declared Italian to be the official language of the Synod on the Family. For better or worse, facility in the language gives one a distinct advantage of understanding and being understood at the Vatican. And the Pope’s even semiformal recognition of this reality serves to torpedo any attempts to return to using Latin as the universal language or to introduce the only other viable alternative, English.

This is all very relevant for trying to understand Pope Francis. A native Spanish speaker who learned Italian as a child from his immigrant parents and relatives, he continuously uses very colourful phrases that are sometimes a mixture of both languages. Add to this his slight, but charming Latin-American accent and the result is that it is sometimes difficult to translate what he’s saying, especially into English.

But this is even true with the Pope’s official texts, which the Vatican translates from the original Italian (or in some cases, Spanish) into several other languages. These translations are not always done quickly. In any case, those in English at times tend to be over-interpretive; that is, they seem to be made more palatable for the conservative part of the English-speaking episcopate. Take, for example, the 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. The section dealing with bishops’ conferences and collegiality (par. 32) manifestly suggests the need to clarify the doctrinal authority of national bishops’ conferences. The Italian says: “ancora non si e esplicitato sufficientemente uno statuto delle Conferenze episcopali che le concepisca come soggetti di attribuzioni concrete, includendo anche qualche autentica autorita dottrinale”, Here’s the official English translation: “a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority has not yet been sufficiently elaborated” Where the Italian uses, “statuto,” the English says “juridical status.” No foul play here, since the second part of the sentence mentions the doctrinal authority of bishops conferences. But it seems to me that translating “statuto” into “juridical status” narrows the meaning of the first part of the sentence.

Another example of things getting a bit lost in translation at the Vatican comes, not from papal texts, but from the controversial interim report at last October's synod, specifically the famous passage on the Church's attitude toward homosexuals. In the original Italian (the official basis for all translations) the text talks about “accogliere le persone omosessuali,” that is, “welcoming homosexual persons.” The Vatican translation in English rendered that, “providing for homosexual persons.” Providing for is clearly different from welcoming. Here it seems that English-speaking bishops put pressure on the leadership of the synod in order to have a translation that would attenuate the impression of a real change in the Church's attitude toward homosexuals.

It is certainly not the only case where such discrepancies in translation, as here, can end up sending different messages to different audiences.

Source: Global Pulse