Dear All,
Consider this for a moment: if a text stays in one place, it disappears. Paper burns and becomes ashes or, like the rest of us, eventually turns to dust. Ink fades. A screen may break or simply be turned off. Digital text is extremely fragile. A blog site may disappear forever, as has happened in at least one of our provinces where the provincial newsletter became a blog... the blog site disappeared one day and all past copies of this historical record vanished forever.
Translation keeps text alive. The translator is a life-giver. All languages, including those less likely to have a digital linguistic community around them are important, and Salesian translators contribute to that importance.
We can all talk about the types of documents we work with, but perhaps a more interesting question to ask is which languages we translate from and into. This subject carries more weight. It sparks an interesting conversation about the variability in language structures and their different roles in society. You and your relationship to the world have undoubtedly been shaped by language. After all, language mirrors the social and political spaces around us.
The Ethnologue catalogue of world languages, which is one of the best linguistic resources, currently lists more than 7000 languages spoken today. That number is constantly in flux, because we’re learning more about the world’s languages every day. And beyond that, the languages themselves are in flux. They are living and dynamic, spoken by communities whose lives are shaped by our rapidly changing world.
Yet, this is a fragile time with roughly a third of languages now considered endangered, often with fewer than 1,000 speakers remaining. Meanwhile, just 23 languages account for more than half the world’s population.
Question: do you speak a dialect? It is an important question for translators because very often dialects are not recognised as a ‘language’. This is troubling, as languages receive a higher legal recognition (and protection) than dialects. A dialect needs to be kept alive too. Do you ever translate into your dialect? Are any of the young people you deal with on a day-to-day basis also dialect speakers?
But I think the Salesian translator from time to time has to deal with dialect in another context - at the Oratory, and in Don Bosco's language. The Best Practice this week contains some of the dialect to be found at the Oratory in Don Bosco’s time and alerts the translator to the need to understand it, otherwise the translation will be incorrect. Imagine if you find Don Bosco using the word parrucca in the following sentence: “Dear Baron: the parrucca was for me and I am happy because you kept the tickets for the poor”. If we translate parrucca as ‘wig’ we have entirely missed the point. Don Bosco was turning a Piedmontese term (fé na pruca) into Italian, far parrucche. And the Piedmontese means to give someone a good telling off! The Baron in question had received two lottery tickets instead of one (probably not by mistake!).
best_practice_41-language-at-Valdocco.docx
