Jun 20, 2011
Anyone who has worked in a country where a foreign language is spoken can testify to the difficulty of translating thoughts and words adequately.
I spent 20 years in El Salvador and have my share of stories about priests and nuns who had trouble converting what they meant to say into Spanish. Likewise, the Salvadorans who tried to express themselves in English had difficulty, although this seemed more comic for us than the mistakes we missionaries made.
I remember a fellow who wanted to have a romantic name for his restaurant. He called it Coffee Love’s, but I am pretty sure that he meant something like Café Love, or Love’s Café, or perhaps Café of Love, but not what he came up with. Something had got lost in the translation.
The difficulties of translation explain why we are getting a new Missal at Advent. A liturgist told a group of priests recently that the effort could be traced to Pope John Paul II, who was listening very closely at a Vespers service in English one day and was surprised because the oration differed so much to the prayer he had said in another language. Differed, that is, not just in the words of another language, but in content.