Dear All,
We have come to the final edition of this translators newsletter, which began on 24 January 2024 and has reached number 50. It has connected some 40 individuals among SDB and FMA and some lay people, provided opportunity to access ‘Salesiana’ for translation purposes or just to view and read such material, and through the Best Practice series has shone a light on some of the joys and challenges of the professional side of translation today through 48 separate items that could suffice, almost, as a course in translation for anyone starting out in this field.
This does not mean the end of access to documents that you might want or need to translate, or of an occasional insight into something concerning Salesian translation. I am happy, while it is possible for me to do so, to make this available; it was one of the motivating reasons for embarking on the newsletter anyway, and came from requests from various translators around the region who felt they did not have easy access to such documents. If you do NOT want to receive any further communication in this regard, let me know and I will drop you off the list. There is little point in sending out emails to people whose inbox is already cluttered???? Don’t forget we have GC29 looming in the immediate future.
So what could the final message for this series be?
As a Congregation, but also as individuals engaged regularly in translation activities, we need to be looking to the future... who will replace us? I am framing this question in the context of language, which is central to individual and group identity, and therefore also central to the Salesian mission. And I am not talking about just the well-known dominant languages either, but the less-recognised languages that are crucial not only to our personal identity, but to the identity of ‘those to whom we are sent’. Many of those less-recognised languages might be oral ones with little or no literature as such. But interpretation rather than translation is still important for these.
There is plenty of talk these days about the ‘digital divide’, but what about the ‘digital language divide’ as well? Lack of access to technology is not the only or even the biggest obstacle to getting marginalised communities across the world connected - instead, it is lack of locally relevant content. Marginalised language means a marginalised sense of identity.
How can we Salesians encourage a different approach? As a Congregation we are beginning to place much more emphasis on international communities. A young Salesian in initial formation in our region may well do some of his formation in a language quite other than his own (e.g. young Samoan novices in Vietnam) or he might be a missionary from a very different part of the world (e.g. a young Croatian as a missionary to Mongolia; a Congolese as a missionary to Taiwan) , so there is an increasing awareness of language and languages and their importance. How can we who are engaged in translation capitalise on this?
We need to begin encouraging young Salesians to work with language translation at their local level, especially if it is also a written language. It is one way of learning a new language and also improving their own language. And it is also a way of appreciating culture, customs and other background details that make evangelisation, even first announcement, possible.
There could be a very practical way to encourage this kind of activity. Throughout the initial formation period (in particular), encourage a young Salesian to download any text from, say, sdb.org or SDL (sdl.sdb.org), short or long, and translate it into their local language. SDL can hold any human language and script, and while, naturally enough, there are many texts available in ‘dominant’ Salesian languages, there are many other languages there as well. However, let’s also assume for the moment that young Salesians in formation in our region are learning or have already learned English and possibly some Italian. What a bonus it would be for everyone concerned if they took a text in one of those languages and translated it into their native language, be it Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Khmer, Tagalog, Cebuano, Fijian, Samoan, Mongolian... and so on. And once that item is translated (we presume they know their local language well enough), send it to me and I will ensure it is uploaded to SDL to be side-by-side with the ‘dominant’ language version. The translations do not need to be perfect!
You could read the final Best Practice to see some further thoughts on this.
best_practice_48_Encouraging-young-translators.docx