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Dear All,

The English translation of a section of the Youth Ministry Frame of Reference is now complete and attached to this email. The title of this rewritten section now becomes “Works and services for young people in situations of vulnerability and exclusion”, presumably replacing the section in the current Frame of Reference with the title “Works and social services for youth-at-risk” (Chapter VII, no. 2.5 in the ‘orange’ section of the booklet). The rewrite is clearly triggered by the Rector Major's letter on this subject in AGC 438. The date on the document is 24 May 2024, so it will be next month (or later), I presume, before the Salesian world is generally informed of the updated material, and I do not know what the precise intentions are, but have to presume that a new 2024 edition of the Frame of Reference will be made available in print.

Presumably a number of you have already translated the Frame of Reference into your local language, so here is an opportunity to update that. But it would be courteous, and indeed correct, to just get on with that task and not make the attached document more broadly public until after 24 May or whenever the Councillor for YM makes a public announcement about it.

This particular translation, among many others, raises the issue of how to deal with quotations or citations in translation. People who are not translators often think that the task is simply to ‘translate’. But if you are actually involved in this art and science, you realise it goes well beyond that. You spend a lot of your time doing background research to locate cited materials and/or quotations marked typographically somehow. So let’s look at what the YM document presented the translator with this time:

  • Fr Miguel Ángel García Morcuende, General Councillor for Youth Ministry, has written a Presentation which he concludes with a poem by Fernando Pessoa. He makes the comment, before offering the poem, that “important things in life are best expressed in poetic codes and registers”. Indeed, but translating poetic codes and registers can be every translator’s worst nightmare! So step 1 is to find out who Fernando Pesso actually is/was. Turns out he was born in Lisbon (and died there) but for much of his life he lived in England, was influenced by great English literature like Shakespeare, wrote much of his poetry and philosophical reflections in English, but then returned to Portugal where he translated English literature into Portuguese, and Portuguese literature into English! But... I saw that the poem was in Italian in our document, so clearly it is a “paraphrase” (all translation is a paraphrase, really), and that gives the translator the right to also produce a paraphrase. Step 2, was to discover if he did in fact write this poem in English, because if so that is the version we need to use. I found a reference that said it was written in Portuguese, but could not find the original. Step 3 was to find out if someone else had translated it ... I found one example, but did not like it. Step 4: produce your own paraphrase, and that is what I did!
  • Memoirs of the Oratory: Obviously quoted in Italian in the document, so needs a recognised English version, not an impromptu, on-the-spot translation. There are several available, but I used the 2010 New Rochelle edition and of course it is important to indicate this at that point.
  • Constitutions and Regulations. Interesting. The only constitutional article quoted on several occasions happens to be one of those that we needed to do considerable work on in the recent revision of the C&R in English: C. 33. So obviously I have used that. This might ‘throw’ some individuals who are not aware of the adjusted translation, but if the aim of that adjustment was to clarify things that were less than clear, then surely we should now indicate the ‘clearer’ version.
  • Church documents: e.g. encyclicals. One has to check these every time without fail. The reference to ‘Chiesa in uscita’ (Church going forth) is given as EG 27 and that is not entirely wrong, but the first and clearer reference to this is EG 20, so my suggestion to the Sector is to use that rather than 27. But for sure, the translator must always check every single reference of this kind, because it is so easy for authors to make mistakes.
  • Typographical marking: It is typical, in Italian written material, to use inverted commas for emphasis. In English we generally try to avoid that and use italics instead. So when we find something like “vicious circles of exclusion” the first thought is that this is a quotation since it uses inverted commas, but there is no reference for it, so do we assume it is emphasis? Of course, there are also occasions when an author will quote someone but not include the reference... and the translator cannot ignore this; it is part of the translation task to determine if it is in fact a real quotation, find it in its original and check that the translation and its wording are as exact as possible. It may also require cross-checking in the same document because the author may be quoting him or herself or someone that is referenced later. There are other typographical ploys used in this text as well: italics, and frames, but it is not easy to determine if some of these are quoted items.
  • Salesian material: e.g. letters of the RM. AGC 438 is quoted frequently. Now because I translated that text originally, I have it in Word format, so it is easy to copy-paste from. But if all you have is the red AGC booklet, then that means extra work for you if the quote is lengthy (and most are in this case). There are also quotes from 1862 and 1877 and thereabouts (Cenni storici... and Regolamento per le case). Well, again I am lucky because I did those translations for Fonti I (Salesian Sources I) so copy-paste is easy. For others, here is where SDL comes in handy. All these documents are available there, usually in PDF where it is still possible to copy-paste from, after some minor adjustments.
  • Bibliography: Usually the translator has to determine what needs translating and what does not. In the case of this document, all of it, but the bibliography at the end is quite generic in this case. The author(s) did not specify publication details, just titles and date, so the translator can quite happily do similarly without needing to research those extra details.

In all of the above we are really dealing with what is called ‘intertextuality’. This is not just a big word for the sake of using a big word! Intertextuality (the relationship between texts) can be both explicit and implicit. In the case of quotation/citation it is explicit. I am attaching a best practice with a few pointers about this. We probably also, some time in the future, need to look at implicit intertextuality, which is much more challenging!

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best_practice_11-citations.docx

 


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