Dear All,
First of all, thanks for response to last week's appeal, and if you have not yet responded yourself, please consider doing so. It was a simple appeal to help not only fill in the gaps regarding the Salesian contribution to language in our Region (or elsewhere), but also can form a background that is important for translators, a background of interest in language, sensitivity to its use.... This is an important context for any translator.
Now, on to another issue important for Salesian translators.
How up to date and familiar are we with the language that the Church is using today? This question came up recently for me in personal correspondence with the General Councillor for Formation vis-a-vis the new Ratio and use of the term ‘Synodality’. The noun form appears once in the current draft 35, but assumes everyone knows what it is. Yet there is an entire Synod now underway in its 2nd session, the ‘Synod on Synodality’, so the Church is still exploring what this means in practice. The view of the Councillor in question is that the Ratio must quite clearly be using the language of the Church today, so this term and others need to be used but also made clear in context.
One of the responses to last week's appeal is the attached Dizionario. This Dictionary of the Church's Social Doctrine is relevant to all of us. Are we quite clear about the kind of terminology the Church is using today in matters touching on its social teaching?
Sure, the material is mainly in Italian (though when an article is prepared by English writers, it is included in English), and is the work of the Catholic Sacred Heart University in Milan, but if you do not understand Italian, you know that these days you can just drop a few paragraphs into Google or DeepL and get the gist of what is being said. Let me save you that bother at least for a paragraph or two from the Presentation of this July-December dossier, so you can get an idea of what it is about:
The ‘Dictionary of the Social Doctrine of the Church. New Items in the 21st century’ is the free-access online quarterly journal edited by the Centro di Ateneo di dottrina sociale della Chiesa and published by Vita e Pensiero, the publishing house of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. Each issue of the magazine collects the new contributions that are added to the Dictionary in a dossier.
The published issues are available in the ‘Pathways’ section of the website, from which they can be downloaded free of charge.
The magazine aims to reach people interested in understanding the challenges of the present in the light of the Church's social teaching, through dialogue between the results of scientific research on a given subject, in an interdisciplinary horizon, and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. This dialogue method takes up and updates the Dictionary of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Social Doctrine of the Church. Social Sciences and the Magisterium, Vita e Pensiero 2004.
There are many ‘new things’ at the beginning of the 21st century: new technologies; new forms of communication and human interaction; new actors and new challenges for peace and global coexistence. We are thinking in particular of the enormous environmental issue, the growing inequality within and between nations, the eruption of new conflicts, health and and educational emergencies, demographic challenges, the impact of artificial intelligence on the daily lives of people and communities...
In the midst of ‘new things’, we are convinced that the social doctrine of the Church is a valuable resource for playing an active role in the ‘change of era’ we are going through. The magazine seeks to be an agile tool in this context for knowing understanding and guiding action.
Why not take a look at the complete dictionary at https://www.dizionariodottrinasociale.it
However, I am taking the actual Best Practice for this week from a single line in the attached dossier, which refers to the fact that this magazine adopts the 'Double-blind review' process. In other words, every article in this magazine has been reviewed by others (who do not know who the author is, and including translation to English in some cases) before being accepted for publication. This idea of peer review is something that is quite definitely a best practice in translation activity but one, unfortunately, rarely adopted by ourselves. This week's Best Practice explains something about peer review and how we might encourage it among ourselves. I am currently doing precisely this with a confrere-translator in another province at the moment. Sure it takes a bit of time at both ends, but the end result will be better because of it.
best_practice_35-peer review.docx
