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Dear all,

Attached, other than the Best Practice, is the RM's message for the March BS. You may find it useful.

Let me raise a question (or two) with you about one of the most typical tasks that a Salesian translator must face each year or, if you are not actually doing translations yourself, something you may still need to explain to others when you see what the translator has done with it - I am referring to the Strenna! Given that this annual ‘message’ is intended for the entire Salesian Family, it is clear that it will need to be translated or at least explained at some point in Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer, Burmese, Korean, Tetum, Bahasa Indonesia, Urdu, Laotian, Samoan, Fijian, Tok Pisin, Tagalog, Cebuano (have I left any language out?). I am referring just to the one or two-line message, not the rest of the ‘commentary’ on it.

Q1. If you are simply the recipient of, say, the English translation of the Strenna (and I am referring to Strennas over a good period of time, let's say ten or fifteen years) have you ever felt that the translation sounds awkward? Maybe even faulty on occasions?

Q2. And if you have felt the need to translate the Strenna locally for your people ... have you ever found this task somewhat demanding, not because of your lack of skill but because either the Italian original or the English translation you are working from seems quite culturally different from your situation, leaving you wondering just how best to express it?

I would be really interested in your response to either of these questions. Of course, it will not apply to every Strenna message. The one we currently have (The dream that makes you dream... etc.) is so fundamental to the charism and to universal human experience, that we feel it can be easily expressed in any human language. At least I think so.

But this is not always the case.

Let us go back as far as 2012, when the RM at the time, Fr Chávez, gave us a Strenna, the Italian original of which reads as follows:

Conoscendo e imitando Don Bosco, facciamo dei giovani la missione della nostra vita.

Now consider the problem that the English translator had at this point:

Can you decide where the ‘focus‘ of the above Strenna sentence lies? If you were saying it aloud, where would the primary stress fall? Or to put it in linguistic terms, what is the ‘theme’ of this sentence, if we define theme as being what the speaker/writer chooses to take as his point of departure: ‘conoscendo’ and ‘imitando’ are non-finite verb forms (-ing verbs in English, without a subject), and it is often not the case that the first words in an Italian sentence are the most important ones. Often it is the last words.  It is not easy to know the real point of departure for this Strenna: Is it ‘getting to know’ or is it ‘imitating’ Don Bosco? Is it what we then do, or is it what we are now doing (‘facciamo’ can mean both), along with getting to know and/or imitating him? Is it the young? Is it the mission of our lives? 

The translator had to make a decision and came up with: Let us make the young our life's mission by coming to know and imitate Don Bosco. Because of the way English works (mostly a subject-verb-object [SVO] language), the translator made a decision to make ‘the young our life’s mission’ the true theme of the sentence and put it first. The message would have been a different one in English had he been more literal in translation and said: ‘Getting to know and imitate Don Bosco, we make the young our mission in life’.

Do you see the problem? Let me add another one:

Last year’s ‘yeast’ Strenna. The reality is that when the translator received the longer text to translate (the Strenna always appears with a number of pages of explanation), he was given the explanatory pages to translate with the actual message itself already translated (“‘As the yeast in today’s human family’. The lay dimension in the Family of Don Bosco) in the six main languages of the Congregation. In other words, the subtle message was ‘noli tangere - don't touch’! And there was no indication of who had done the English translation. It is quite possible that our translator may not have chosen the word ‘yeast’, but perhaps ‘leaven’ for a number of reasons, or he may indeed have chosen ‘yeast’, but that is not the point here.

The choice of the annual Strenna is not just the Rector Major’s. Sure, it is his to start with, but in recent years he has then presented his initial thoughts to the Salesian Family Advisory Council for comment and discussion, before finalising matters. But, as Fr Giuseppe Bertello, General Councillor for Vocational Schools in 1901, said way back then (only noticed this because I am currently translating it for the new Salesian Sources 2), “There is no doubt that if we want to work profitably for the glory of God and the good of the people, we must also get a move on and progress with our century, appropriating what is good in it, indeed, being in the forefront if possible, on the path of true progress...” 

And the reality is that in the 21st century, with developments in translation which include internationalisation, localisation, globalisation and transcreation (more on this later), there is something missing: Early on in the process, the Strenna message would be well served if it also passed through people who are competent in the cultural translation field to see if it will work (or better, how it can be made to work) across especially non-European cultures, given that we are in 90 or more countries throughout the world, the majority of them non-European.

I therefore ask you to take a look at this week’s Best Practice, which offers an approach to transcreation that may well be appropriate to the Salesian Congregation in the 21st Century. And if you have any reactions to this, please share them... positive or negative though they may be.

But before you read it, here is just the briefest explanation of what I mean by ‘transcreation’.

Transcreation means going beyond the mere meaning of a phrase or text so that it resonates with culture and social context in a particular place. Of course, Salesians translating into so many languages that are not European or not even Indo-European will say that they are already aware of this need, and do their best to accommodate it. And that is true. They do.

My argument is slightly different... Transcreation means a different starting point. Instead of starting with the finally chosen source text (e.g. the Strenna message already translated into just 6 European languages) the process instead might start with a Brief (descrizione, spiegazione, ragguagli in Italian) that goes out to at least some appropriate people around the Salesian world with request for a quick and brief comment on the cultural translation of the message. Major global companies have learnt much about this in the 20th and 21st century, and that is what they now do when they have a global message to pursue. We too can ‘get a move on, progress with our century, appropriating what is good in it’ in this regard. 

The reality is that the shorter a motto or message or tagline is, the more it may encounter problems when translated into another culture. Its very brevity leaves people to fill in the gaps, which they do from their understanding, which is not always the same as the understanding of the author of the message. Think of the Strenna message as the tip of an iceberg... with the world’s cultures lying beneath!

Sometimes it requires just minor tweaks. Are you aware that McDonald’s (of Big Mac fame) motto, “I'm lovin’ it” was first launched in German, where it was “Ich liebe es”? Now that could have been translated into English as ”I love it”, but that would not have appealed to middle-class America as much as the more casual, less formal and even more active “I’m lovin’ it”. It experienced another change when it was brought over to French, with the phrase translating to “C’est tout ce que j’aime,” which, literally translated into English, means “All that I love.” The literal translation of the German and English would have been “J’adore ça,” but this was deemed unsuitable, even though it was grammatically accurate, because the word for word translation didn’t convey the same level of enthusiasm the company wanted. “J’aime” was better! Here's how some other languages translated it: Me encanta (Spanish); вот что я люблю (Russian = here is what I like); 我就喜歡 (Chinese "I just love [it]"), Amo muito tudo isso (Portuguese: I very much love all this), but interestingly, Italian, Danish and Swedish all use the English slogan. I think (locals can check for me) that it was Love ko 'to in the Philippines. So some regions/countries chose to adapt or transcreate it, others not. Interesting! As is also the fact that up until then McDonald’s slogans had all focused on ‘you’, whereas this one focuses on ‘I’, in keeping with the individualistic zeitgeist of our times, probably.

Now, I suggest you read the Best Practice.

 

best_practice_5-transcreation.docx