Cardinal Pell's Address to Sacrosanctum Concilium Conference

"A translation is not an exercise in creativity, but a meticulous task of preserving the meaning of the original without changes, omissions or additions." Rome, February 21, 2014 (Zenit.org) | 678 hits

Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, delivered the following address at a Rome conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council constitution on the liturgy,Sacrosanctum Concilium. The conference, whose theme theme was "Gratitude and commitment to a great movement of ecclesial communion", took place at the Pontifical Lateran University Feb. 18-20. As someone heavily invovled in the new translation of the English Missal, Cardinal Pell spoke about the issue of liturgical translations.

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LITURGICAL TRANSLATIONS AND TWO INSTRUCTIONS

IN PERSPECTIVE[1]

I.

LITURGICAL TRANSLATIONS

The Age of Translation

In our global village today translations play a great part. The supranational bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations Organisation battle with the diplomatic and linguistic niceties of ensuring the translation of Thai texts into Estonian, Mongol into Greek and Maltese into Indonesian. The many channels of Italian television offer, alongside locally produced programmes, a myriad of films and other imported transmissions dubbed expertly into the Italian language. An inexpensive electric torch comes with an instruction sheet in 32 languages. Our computers are equipped with software capable in seconds of translating between many tongues and even reading them aloud.

Naturally, some of these translations are ephemeral, gone on the wind like our everyday casual conversations, but it is a challenge of another higher order to translate Dickens into Polish, Flaubert into Quechua and Dostoievsky into English.

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Cardinal Pell's Address to Sacrosanctum Concilium Conference