Dear All,
Wherever we live, there is a ‘standard’ language and inevitably one or more ‘dialects’ of it. This will be true of any language. In English we tend not to speak of dialects so much, but they exist just the same - on some sort of scale from just a slight pronunciation difference to being almost incomprehensible. English speakers from outside of Australia and New Zealand might not be able to pick any difference between speakers from those two nations, but the Aussies and the Kiwis immediately know the difference and (more often than not) they gently mock each other for it! Something similar might be said for USA and Canada. And within the UK, is Scots a dialect? It is actually defined officially as another language that also has its own dialects. A Scot will say Dae ye ken?= Do you know? It shows the German connection (Kennen Sie?). The USA is thought to have dialects, usually defined in terms of geography: Northern, Midland, Southern, Western etc., but with lots of sub-dialects. And in our region, most countries have dialects
However, if you are translating from another (foreign) language and it contains snippets of dialect, or you feel the need to represent accent and translate idiom, then you have a challenge before you. Has it ever occurred to you that when we read translated texts containing the words of Salesians from the past (including Don Bosco) or even the present... we tend to always get ‘standardised’ language versions, where dialect and accent have been stripped out, as if all that matters is the message and not the vehicle it came in. We need to think seriously about that.
And we have to be careful! Saint Leonard Murialdo’s Cause for Canonisation was held up because Pope Pius XII did not understand Piedmontese (neither the language nor the culture), and at a certain point he wrote to the Postulator for the Cause: ‘Do not insist any more on the Murialdo Cause, I cannot give my consent to proceed, because I cannot bear that word, because it is a bad word. [...] Let me die and the other Pope can do what he thinks, I don’t feel like it.’ What is this ‘word’ that had been used, and what was the context for it? It was an expression in Piedmontese: “fe nen i cojon” which, if simply translated into Italian, is pejorative and vulgar, both in its literal as well as its figurative sense. What Murialdo had been expressing was effectively along the lines of ‘Let's not be idiots about this’. Murialdo had written this in a letter to a Piedmontese friend after a dispute with a baker to whom he had owed money. Just as Don Bosco had done in similar circumstances, Murialdo had tried to convince the baker to wait a little longer until money came in that would allow payment, but the baker had ranted and raved for half an hour... and Pius XII just couldn’t get his head around the use of the word in question, which he only understood in its standard Italian version, even though, in the letter, Murialdo had followed his Piedmontese usage with the Latin phrase ‘sit venia verbo’ (forgive the use of the word). But as was successfully argued under the new Pope John XXIII, who allowed the Cause to proceed, the authoritative Gran dizionario piemontese-italiano said of the phrase in question that it was an exhortative-imperative way of saying “don’t be a smart-ass, don’t play dumb in order to cheat” and while a somewhat straightforward way of speaking, it would not be regarded as vulgar in an exchange between two Piedmontese, especially among friends (the word had not been used with the baker, but in a letter to a friend about the baker). Murialdo had also used the word ‘mincion’ in another exchange (we find it italianised in the Italian Memoirs of the Oratory as well). It is stronger in Italian (minchione) than it is in Piedmontese, where it means a simpleton, a good-for-nothing.
Social and geographical differences, history, sensitivities: these are all tied up very often in dialect, accent, idiom. Strip these away in translation and you lose the real texture of what is being said. Get them wrong and you might offend someone. Do you remember the scenes in The Simpsons with the Scottish character Willie with his red beard and kilt and, of course, Scots accent? Well, in Italy they decided to make him a Sardinian. Does it work? How many Sardinians with red beards and kilts have you seen?
Can’t resist telling you of a very funny incident that happened a few years ago when a friend and I (who is reading this newsletter!) had very little money between us and we were driving from Rome to Naples, but avoiding the autostrada where you had to pay. Problem was that the GPS we were using gave its commands in Berlusconi’s voice and ‘dialect‘. Our wrong turns were unprintable!!
The Best Practice offers some possible ways forward when dealing with snippets of dialect, accent, idiom.
See below a note from Universalis (online liturgy of the hours and other liturgy) so you can be aware of a major change in the translation of the Bible for Great Britain.
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The new English lectionary
The Bishops of England, Wales and Scotland have decided that a new version of the readings at Mass shall be used, starting on Advent Sunday, 1 December 2024. This new Lectionary will use the English Standard Version (a derivative of the RSV) rather than the Jerusalem Bible. This means that everybody in Great Britain needs new Lectionaries and new Missals.
Many people are writing to ask us whether – and when – the new readings will appear in Universalis. The answer is: yes, we intend that they should appear, but we cannot yet exactly say when.
We have received the new texts from the Catholic Liturgy Office. We have processed them and they are in our database. Everyone owes a debt of gratitude to hard-worked volunteers of the Catholic Liturgy Office who not only edited two thousand readings and psalms but also provided them in a format which was so clear and consistent that even a machine could handle them.
It now remains to get permission and make arrangements for the licensing of these texts. The relevant people have been contacted and we are waiting to hear back from them.
