Translation news.

Darwin points to an interview with Bishop Roche, the chair of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, and highlights a descriptive explanation of one of the proposed changes in the English translation of the ordinary form of the Mass.  It's one from the very beginning, so it's a good place to look.

Why does the ICEL hope to change the greeting from "The grace and peace of God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, be with you all" to "Grace to you and peace from God, Our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ"?  They mean essentially the same thing; the first one sounds much more natural and the other more stilted; we're all used to the first one. 

Reason:  The second one is a quote from most standard English translations of the New Testament.  The distinctive word-order of the greeting appears eleven times.  It is distinctive in the Greek, and the distinction was preserved in the Latin.  And as Bishop Roche points out, that's an indication from the earliest times of a distinctive way Christians greeted each other.  That's why we should hang on to it. 

So maybe it's even more important than my previous favorite example, that instead of saying "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,"  we should be saying, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof." 

Darwin uses the occasion to wish we were all speaking more Latin, arguing from the utility of picking up hot Hungarian chicks at World Youth Day, an argument which I think I can appreciate, if only by analogy.  Still, I'm really excited about the new English translation.  I can't stop myself from muttering, in my head, things like And with your spirit at Mass. which probably tells you something about how geeky I am.

Read more of the interview.

(Incidentally, I was googling around and found some discussions in French which make it sound as though it's not just we Anglophones who have this kind of problem with our translations.  Maybe Darwin is right -- we just need to learn some of the important bits in Latin.  We all know what Kyrie Eleison means and hardly anybody speaks Greek, so why not?)