It’s not so much that the (spoken) language changed, but that the written language did in a way: the use of the archaic literary language in formal and official contexts was dropped in most cases in favor of a more modern standard or the spoken vernacular, and the Chinese characters (
hanzi/
kanji) used were simplified. It’s not as if the Chinese and the Japanese all of a sudden switched from speaking classical Chinese and classical Japanese (which are, even then, already
dead as a spoken language for hundreds of years) to say, Mandarin or Cantonese and modern Japanese overnight.
The Raguet New Testament is BTW
available here. AFAIK the Barbaro translation isn’t available online - I think it’s still under copyright.
There are two modern translations which are pretty much the standard in Japanese Catholicism: the Franciscan version (フランシスコ会訳
Furanshisuko kai-yaku) produced by the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, which was commenced in 1956 and finished in 1978, and the so-called
New Interconfessional Translation (新共同訳
Shin Kyōdō-yaku) released in 1987, which was a joint ecumenical effort.
Before the Franciscan version was released, there was really no official Catholic translation of the Bible into Japanese. Translations available - like Raguet’s and later, Barbaro’s - were all personal efforts, plus they used the Vulgate as source text. This is in contrast to many Protestant churches, which had then pretty much adopted the
1917 Taisho Revised Version (大正改訳
Taishō Kai-yaku, in classical Japanese -
available here!) as the de facto standard, and the
Japanese Orthodox, which had their own translation made by
St. Nicholas of Japan (also in an archaic form of the language - which incidentally they still use today in the Divine Liturgy, also translated by Nicholas into archaic Japanese).
The Franciscan version was produced essentially to compete with the so-called
Colloquial Version (口語訳,
Kōgo-yaku) produced by the Japanese Bible Society in 1956. The original plan was to complete the translation within ten years, but they have only gotten as far to releasing the first volume (Genesis) in 1958 that it was realized that the project would take longer to finish if they proceeded as planned due to various reasons. So they adopted the approach of releasing one volume per year, and translation work on the NT became simultaneous with that of the OT (originally the OT was to be translated first before the NT). Eventually the first volume of the NT (Mark) was released in 1962. Just two years after that, the Salesian missionary
Fr. Federico Barbaro (1913-1996) released his own translation of the OT from the Vulgate - his translation of the NT already came out eleven years earlier.
Eventually, the Franciscan committee finished translation work on the NT in 1978 and released it in a single volume in 1980, just around the time when the original Interconfessional Translation was released. That didn’t stop the translation work though; work on the OT continued until 2002, when the final volume (Jeremiah) was released. The complete Bible was released fairly recently in 2011. Part of the reason for the translation delay was because many of the translators of the Franciscan version also worked on - were “given up to” - the 1978 Interconfessional Translation.
BTW did I mention the differences in the transliteration of names of biblical figures?
