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Dear all,

A fortnight ago the YM Sector released what they are calling "ITINERARIES: A youth ministry that educates to love". I am sure most people will understand what they mean by ‘itineraries’, but the native English speaker might wonder about that choice, as they might regarding other aspects of this document's translation. At the very least it could sound like an exciting tour, though personally I think a different different word, maybe ‘pathways’, could have been chosen, especially because they then go on to point out a series of ‘paths’ for core areas in education to love.

This could be something of a cautionary tale for translators. Consider the famous sentence (at least in its English original): “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall” — you probably know the sad story; he had a great fall! And, by the way, the term ‘Humpty Dumpty’ was a nickname for a rather large cannon perched on a wall at the time, but Lewis Carroll anthropomorphises it for us!

“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more or less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

— Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass (sequel to Alice in Wonderland)

“The translator who understands his job feels, constantly, like Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets and hedgehogs for balls; words are forever eluding his grasp.” (Ronald Knox from his Englishing the Bible.)

You only have to think of Humpty Dumpty, when expressed in languages other than English, to realise how translators have to consider their target language as much as the source language. Humpty goes on, in his discussion with Alice, to tell us that “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs ...”:

In English, the verb is marked for tense: Humpty ‘sat’.

In Indonesian, the verb ‘duduk’ would not alter for tense.

In Russian, the verb сидел would also tell us if our anthropomorphic egg was male or female and whether Humpty was sitting for a long time or had already had a great fall (complete or incomplete action).

In Turkish, the verb ‘oturmuş’ would tell us how we came by this information: did we see Humpty ourselves or did we hear about him from someone else?

In Pitjantjatjara, an Australian first nations language, the verb ‘nyarinyi’ is equivalent to the verb ‘to be’. The language has no actual verb to be or to have, quite a novelty for a language! Here it means a posture, sitting, so Humpty takes on a far more philosophical position than at first we realise!

In Fijian, the conversation between Alice and Humpty would have started by Alice asking a few intrusive questions, like “Where are you going?”, followed by ‘How old are you?” and maybe even “Are you married?” Humpty would not need to give any definite answers to any of these, not even get offended by them since they are (almost obligatory) conversation starters when you meet a stranger. He just needs to give a flick of the head (is that why he fell off the wall?)

So who is the master then? The reader, the words, the source language, the target language … ? And where does this leave us with ‘itinerary’?

Let's go to Italian for a moment: there is what we might call a ‘metaphor cluster’ that has emerged over recent years in Salesian (and maybe even Church) discourse, containing words such as itinerario, percorso, cammino, tappa, accompagnamento…. We know this is an emerging metaphor in Salesian discourse, because even a minimal corpus study (easily done by reducing a range of texts to simple text format then searching them for a term) shows us that these terms are found in the Memorie Biografiche almost without exception as physical or spatial references to a journey. But restrict that corpus to texts from the past several decades, e.g. a random 1,000 files from ANS, and focus on just one of those terms, itinerario, and the result is as follows: itinerario di vita, ~ di educazione alla fede, ~ pedagogico, ~ formativo, ~ di formazione ai giovani, ~ di crescita, ~ di discernimento, ~ di santificazione, ~ di evangelizzazione, ~ vocazionale, ~ di preghiera, ~ di liturgia, ~ di vita sacramentale.... The words that regularly appear near  percorso are very similar, as are those for cammino: il cammino dei giovani oggi, ~ spirituale e pastorale, ~ di crescita e maturazione, ~ di santificazione, ~ di ascesi, ~ di fidanzamento. And in the random modern corpus there are practically no uses of the terms in their literal physical or spatial journey sense, though there is no reason why there should not be. In other words, these terms have become part of a way of thinking and acting that qualify them as ‘conceptual’ metaphors, ways of perceiving our Salesian world and helping us make sense of it. Underlying them is what the field of Cognitive Linguistics today would describe as a fundamental image-schema or ‘frame’ in embodied human experience which we might express as EDUCATION (to love in this case) IS LIKE A JOURNEY.

None of which means that we have to translate ‘itinerario’ every time in English as ‘itinerary’. Yes, journeys may have itineraries, travel plans, routes but is that what this book is describing? What we are dealing with here, as you can see from the corpus examples above, is something that translators always have to be alert to: a word in one language may have a broader semantic range than its equivalent in another. In some ways it is a ‘false friend’ we are dealing with here. 

Would it be ‘curriculum’ then? Not really, at least I don't think it is in this case. An itinerario in its Italian meaning here is a set of actions to achieve a goal.  Maybe it is a basic outline, a set of strategies, procedures, processes... all possible contenders. Or, in this case, possibly we could call it ‘pathways’. If you read the document (the link is above) you can work it out for yourself.

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The Best Practice this week is not specifically tied to the above. It is a series of ten tips for Salesian translators. Hope you find it helpful.

Other files attached:

1. There are more texts for the Video for MHC this month (a series of introductory notes for each day, and testimonies, though notice that Testimony Six is attached separately. I just received it). Here also is access for you to the testimonies videos if you want to dub at least that part of this into your own language. As I assume the complete video has not been assembled as yet, I do not have access to the complete Master tape, but should it come my way, I will pass it on.

2. As promised, the titles of texts contained in Part Three of Salesian Sources 2, this time the overall theme is Spirituality and consecrated life. Should you want any of the individual text let me know and I will send them to you.

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best_practice_13-ten-tips.docx

 


List of Articles
No. Subject Author Date Views
30 Translators newsletter No. 30 “TM" Best Practice No. 28 - Using Matecat file tolle 2024.08.17 156
29 Translators newsletter No. 29 “How long does it take to...?" Best Practice No. 27 - Translation time file tolle 2024.08.10 161
28 Translators newsletter No. 28 “Learning Language Through Translation" Best Practice No. 26 - Learning through translation file tolle 2024.08.04 159
27 Translators newsletter No. 27 “Online with saints..." Best Practice No. 25 - TEP file tolle 2024.07.27 182
26 Translators newsletter No. 26 “Lively debates!" Best Practice No. 24 - Terminology file tolle 2024.07.20 172
25 Translators newsletter No. 25 “Voicing the Word" Best Practice No. 23 - Orality file tolle 2024.07.13 186
24 Translators newsletter No. 24 “Dealing with dialect, accent, idiom" Best Practice No. 22 - Dialect file tolle 2024.07.07 173
23 Translators newsletter No. 23 “Pastoral translation - 1” Best Practice No. 21 - FABC file tolle 2024.06.29 183
22 Translators newsletter No. 22 “Not word-for-word but world-for-world” Best Practice No. 20 - World-for-world file tolle 2024.06.22 185
21 Translators newsletter No. 21 “When a word makes a difference” Best Practice No. 19 - Glossary file tolle 2024.06.14 171
20 Translators newsletter No. 20 “Be a ‘smart’ translator” Best Practice No. 18 - SDB Resources file tolle 2024.06.08 171
19 Translators newsletter No. 19 “Translating Jesus!” Best Practice No. 17 - Mysticism file tolle 2024.06.03 197
18 Translators newsletter No. 18 “What shoes should a translator wear? Ratio” Best Practice No. 15 - Multimedia translation 1 file tolle 2024.05.25 177
17 Translators newsletter No. 17 “With sighs too deep for words” Best Practice No. 16 - Translators prayers file tolle 2024.05.25 199
16 Translators newsletter No. 16 “Multimedia translation” Best Practice No. 14 - Multimedia translation tolle 2024.05.25 192
» Translators newsletter No. 15 “Humpty Dumpty” Best Practice No. 13 - Ten tips for Salesian translators file tolle 2024.05.25 168
14 Translators newsletter No. 14 “Turning to the Scriptures” Best Practice No. 12 - Christianese file tolle 2024.05.25 156
13 Translators newsletter No. 13 “YM - quotations, citations” Best Practice No. 11 - Quotations, citations file tolle 2024.05.25 184
12 Translators newsletter No. 12 “Hagiography” Best Practice No. 10 - Hagiography file tolle 2024.05.25 204
11 Translators newsletter No. 11 “C&R” Best Practice No. 9 - Juridical file tolle 2024.05.25 179
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