What I find funny is that people will say “why don’t we just do it in Latin” or “why don’t we just do it this way” or “that way”. Those people are offering their opinions or preferences on how the translation should or should not be done, and I bet they would love to have their advice at least heard and acknowledged. Why not extend the courtesy to priests?
From my perspective, I’m not at all offended that no one ever asked for my (name removed by moderator)ut. Seriously, I’m not. Sure, there are times when I say to myself, or say to someone else, “I’d like to see it this way…” But then reality sinks in.
I remember things like diocese-wide meetings of priests, and I think of all the “(name removed by moderator)ut” everybody wants to have on something like a diocese program. These things can drag on forever while we have to sit there and listen to someone describe a wedding 15 years ago, at length, when the topic is something like priest automobile insurance. And it’s not just priests either, it happens in all segments of our society: “whenever two or more of you are gathered, people will ramble on forever about minutia.” (I can’t remember where, but it’s somewhere in one of the Gospels).
Seriously, from a practical perspective, how would something like that happen? Should the Vatican open a special Vatican PO Box and say “anyone who has something to say, drop us a letter” (or I suppose a special email address nowadays). The Church has over a billion people. It just isn’t possible to allow everyone to have some (name removed by moderator)ut into something. Even if we narrow it down to just English-speaking (since translation is the topic after all), or even English-speaking priests, the logistics alone of sorting through all the comments would be mind-boggling.
Over the years, I’ve occasionally made “suggestions” about liturgical matters to my bishops. They have always at least listened, and a few times, taken the idea to the next level (after all, if the idea itself is a good one, others will also make the same suggestions).
The current Sacramentary is 1,100+ pages. Just try to imagine all the comments that would flow in. “offertory prayer for 8th Sunday of Ordinary Time, change the word offerings to the word gifts…” Seriously, how many such comments would be received if the process were open to every priest offering (name removed by moderator)ut? Who would sort those comments, who would decide what’s worthy of consideration? We all know the answer, and that is “the bishops.” Well, guess what, we already have such a process in place. The draft copies of these prayers have been available for years. Any priest who had a serious and legitimate suggestion already did have the opportunity to take that suggestion to his own bishop–and I venture to guess that many did in fact do that.
Even in our democratic society, we don’t craft our laws that way. We tell our legislators “what” we want, and we leave it to them to find the right words. If we opened up our legislative process to allow everyone to have (name removed by moderator)ut on the exact words of every law, our governments would never get anything accomplished.
Let’s all keep in mind that we’re talking about a process of translating here. Not a process of composing new texts. While translating is not an exact science, if the translators themselves stick to the principles outlined by Rome, there won’t be too much variation from one to the next, and what little variation does exist will come down to a matter of personal preference; things like “I think it sounds better to say it this way when it’s spoken aloud”
The actual words being translated don’t vary all that much. When one simply thinks about it, our Mass texts have a rather limited vocabulary. That’s why I can say Mass in Spanish even though I don’t know the language–precisely because the vocabulary is so limited that a priest says the same words over and over again from one week to the next, with very little in the way of changes. This is not at all like translating a novel from Russian or German into English. We’re dealing with a limited number of Latin words, and we already have English equivalents for them. In other words, it’s not as if we have to translate cultural ideas or nuances that might exist in one language but not another.
The bottom line is that we don’t really need (name removed by moderator)ut from a lot of people. What we do need are translators whom we can trust to faithfully translate the texts from Latin into English, without giving any thoughts as to how they can change or alter the Latin into something else in English. If only we had that from the very beginning, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.
