Again, I think there’s a significant difference between “faithful” and “literal”. You seem to be conflating the two. Sorry if I misunderstand your points.
I would not have picked the word “faithful” to govern this discussion, except that you remarked:
No, the point is not “more faithfully” but rather “more literally.”
. . .
**Both translations are “faithful” **but the 3rd edition of the Missal will be more literal to the Latin text of the past few centuries.
I know perfectly well that there’s a difference between “faithful” and “literal” translation. Take the phrase
Orate, fratres. A literal translation is “Pray, brothers.” But “Pray, brothers and sisters” is at least faithful, under a hermeneutic of dynamic equivalence, to the extent it coveys the same meaning to a modern English-speaker that the original would have conveyed to an ancient Latin-speaker. On the other hand, something like (hypothetically speaking, of course) “Join me, my friends” is neither a literal translation nor a faithful dynamic translation.
The point is, who determines what a “faithful translation” is?
Or scholars, theologians, you, me, etc.?
We’re all entitled to make our evaluations, I suppose, though in the end, obviously, it’s the Church’s judgment that is of practical effect.
You said the current translations are not faithful. Right? I didn’t say you said they were against the Catholic faith. But you did say they were unfaithful translations. Right?
So my question remains, if they are really unfaithful (and not merely non-literal) translations, what does that mean? Given the approval authority for the translations?
It means we’ve been using things that, in many cases, are not translations of the Latin, but more akin to new compositions. It’s like how the memorial acclamation “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” is not, and has never been, in the Latin text of the Mass in any way, shape, or form, but it was proposed and sent to Rome along as an option in the English translations, and approved.
There is
in principle nothing wrong with using new compositions instead of translations of the Latin. If an episcopal conference says, “That prayer is lame and we don’t like it, can we replace it with something we wrote?”, and if Rome approves it, then it’s an approved variation in the Mass. The Mass has had approved variations for as long as history can record; it’s not conceptually problematic. But let’s at least not call the new prayer “a translation” of the Latin.
A fair amount of what’s in the present missal is sort of in between. In many places, such as the examples I’ve given, our present English missal deals with the same concepts and topics as the original, but often leaves out giant chunks of meaning, scrambles things around, radically alters the tone, and generally does not convey to an English-speaker anything like what a Latin-speaker would get out of the original text.
I don’t know enough about the history of ICEL (called ICET at the time, right?) to know whether they actually presented the current English texts as “translations,” or whether they were more open about the fact that in many respects they were writing an English Mass rather than translating a Latin Mass into English. Again, there is nothing conceptually incorrect about the latter approach, and for all I know in 1970 everybody understood perfectly well that that’s what was being done. It’s not a criticism to say that their work is “not a faithful translation” if they weren’t really trying to translate at all, but rather to generate their own, conceptually related work. There’s no accusation, nor even the possibility, of “faithlessness” in a judgmental respect, because someone who is not translating but instead composing does not have to be faithful, and indeed cannot really be. If they’ve asked permission to compose rather than translate, and been given it, and if their product is submitted and approved, then nothing is conceptually amiss. It just isn’t a translation, that’s all.
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