Dear All,
Very soon, I know, there will be a request from the Caritas Sisters of Jesus regarding their annual Report from their worldwide communities, since their tradition is for all communities to share a report on their activities for the Feast of the Sacred Heart in June. That report will be in Japanese, and they will want it in English. But, you ask, how can that be possible, unless you know Japanese?
Well, it is possible and that is through a process known as indirect translation, something that is much more common than you think, and many of you who are reading this newsletter are relying on it much more than you think!
Thanks to some months under the tutelage of the now long-deceased but outstanding Irish missionary Father Frank Drohan SDB, who knew Japanese better than some native speakers of the language (or so they told me!), and a year of Japanese 40 years ago at university, I have some very basic Japanese. But of course that is not the point. I would never succeed in successfully translating the Sisters' reports with the very little grasp I have of the language. So how does it happen? Through indirect translation!
There are several SCG communities in English-speaking countries (Australia, South Sudan where some English is spoken, Papua New Guinea) but with few exceptions the Sisters speak either Japanese or Korean and enough English to get by... Papua New Guinea might be an exception, since they have been there for a lengthy period. But the General House is in Rome, so the Sisters there, from whom I receive translation requests, speak Italian. In other words, I might receive material from them in Italian or in 'DeepL-ized' English from Japanese, usually with the Japanese original attached for checking purposes. But whichever way, it will then be my task to ensure that the messages or reports are in good, readable English, since they want new Sisters from English-speaking countries to be able to read important material (and that also includes their Constitutions and Regulations) in English. So we do arrive at a conclusion that satisfies all parties, and any doubts are resolved through the intermediary language, Italian. They trust me, I trust them, which also happens to be an important part of the process.
This raises three questions or comments, I believe:
1. The SCG are an EAO-founded Congregation and official member of the Salesian Family for whom translation is absolutely vital. Should SF translators be part of this network we have now developed? The answer is up to you... and perhaps to contacts you may have with translators in SF Groups in the Region. You would need to approach such contacts and check their interest (maybe let them see earlier emails), then forward relevant names, email addresses to me.... over to you!
2. The question of indirect translation. We might need to look more carefully at it, and what it means for us. If any of us have read Russian literature in English (e.g. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov...), we need to realise that we received it in English initially through French. In the 18th and 19th centuries, pretty much all 'Literary' translation of non-European languages came through French. And then there is the Bible! The Septuagint to start with, since around 3rd century BC Jewish translators translated the Torah into Greek. In the 4th century AD St Jerome produced the Vulgate, and up until 600 AD all Scripture had to be in Latin, and in 1546 the Council of Trent made it the exclusive Latin authority for the Bible. Skipping Martin Luther's efforts in German, most English Bible translations at least until the 19th century came from the Vulgate, not directly from Hebrew or Greek. In 1943 Pius XII (Divino Afflante Spiritu) directed that translations should be from the original languages. Of course, now we have machine translation, AI as well.... which also forms of indirect translation. And some of you rely on English translations of Salesian material rather than the original Italian.
3. Back to the SCG. This year, the Mother General (Sr Emiliana Park Youn Sook), in her Letter for 2024 gave her Sisters the motto: Let us expand the Caritas ‘tent’, dreaming together with the world. The tent idea comes from the Israelites in the desert... the Tent of Meeting, the Tabernacle, just as the Sisters’ first ‘house’, the Kyugoin, was a house that embraced all who wished to come. Those among us who read the daily Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours will realise that these last few weeks the readings have been from Exodus and Leviticus, focusing very much on the Tent of Meeting.
A reflection? “... everyone skilful to whom the Lord had given skill, everyone whose heart was stirred to come to do the work” (Ex 36:2): this fragment is oft-repeated in reference to those tasked with building the Tabernacle, or special Tent, for the presence of the Lord. You know, this Tent of Meeting could be a very good image for the work of the translator, both for the ‘builders’ of the Tent and for what the tent represents. The Tent of Meeting mediated the presence of the Lord among the Israelites moving from one culture and language (Egyptian) back to what they had been exiled from and had forgotten and would have to rebuild... not just a Temple but a recovered language, interacting with new languages. Just like the Tent of Meeting, translation is a meeting point in space and time. A sacred meeting point.
And our task as translators is a sacred ‘building’ task by skilful people to whom the Lord has given skill, whose heart is stirred to come to do the work.
And the other reflection closely related to translation is to ask what went on in that Tent of Meeting, given that God said “with him I speak face to face - clearly, not in riddles” (Num 12:8), ‘him’ being Moses who had complained to God that “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Ex 4:10). Slow in what tongue? Probably Egyptian, because he was supposed to go and talk to Pharaoh, or was it Hebrew, which he might have begun to forget? (Or was he just being coy with God!). But at the very least we are invited to think of how the primordial divine language, the divine Ursprache, is revealed in human language, and our (again) sacred task as translators. We are invited to a theologically inflected theory of language, or, in the final words of Walter Benjamin's famous essay on the Task of the Translator, “all great writings, but above all holy scripture, contain their virtual translation between the lines. The interlinear version of the holy scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.”
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Do you have any reflections you could share or add?
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- The Best Practice for this week looks at one aspect of indirect translation (MT) as 'pre-translation'.
- Thanks to those who have returned comments on the BoscoFood sheets for the Mission Sector proposed book, and could I ask those who have not done so to do so as soon as possible.
- Next week we hope Fr Albeiro Rodas SDB (Cambodia) will share with us the recent session on “Breaking barriers in communication and translation of languages using AI, the smart phone...” at the conference for indigenous peoples being held in Kep, Cambodia.
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best_practice_7-pre-translation.docx
