This is about as close to ranting as Jimmy Akin gets, and I'm cheering. After an explanation of the latest bad summary of something the Pope didn't really say (in this case, "Pope challenges Big Bang theory," which not only didn't happen, it's just nuts if you know anything about B16), Jimmy tackles the problem on the Vatican side:
... [A] couple of thoughts for the folks responsible for getting the Pope’s homilies up on the Vatican web site (translators, web guys, whoever):
1) What’s the major international language these days? Hint: It’s not Italian.
It’s also not French, or Spanish, or even Chinese. It’s English. English has 450 million native and secondary speakers. It is an official or the majority language in fifty-seven countries (nearly twice that of its closest competitor, French, which has this distinction in 31 countries).
If you want to get the Pope’s message out to the world and avoid (or at least mitigate) him being misunderstood due to difficulty checking what he actually said, devote the resources needed to get his speeches on the web site in English in a timely manner! Don’t make us wait over a week, as in this case, by which time the media story has grown cold and sewn whatever misunderstandings it contained. Also . . .
2) Make sure that your translation into English is correct.
Because it isn’t always.
There have been any number of cases when people point to a sloppy translation that has been posted on the Vatican web site and come away with a misimpression. This is particularly bad because people will say—and often have said—“Hey, this is what it says on the Vatican’s own web site!” It’s understandable that they’d think that what they find on the Vatican’s web site is accurately translated, and they have every right to think that, because it should be.
But too often it’s not, and it creates a mess for those of us who are trying to help get the Vatican’s actual message out, in spite of mistranslations appearing on its web site.
So lest anybody be too sure that just because something appears on Vatican.va, it must be an accurate translation, consider this passage from the English version of Pope Benedict’s Epiphany homily:
And so we come to the star. What kind of star was the star the Magi saw and followed? This question has been the subject of discussion among astronomers down the centuries. Kepler, for example, claimed that it was “new” or “super-new”, one of those stars that usually radiates a weak light but can suddenly and violently explode, producing an exceptionally bright blaze.
These are of course interesting things but do not guide us to what is essential for understanding that star.
Here the Pope asks a question we’ve all wondered about: What was the Star of Bethlehem? He notes as an “example” (presumably one among several) an idea Kepler had and says it is “interesting” (which means he finds it interesting, not that he’s endorsing it as the truth), and all that’s fine.
What is not fine is the way whoever translated this rendered the Pope’s description of Kepler’s idea.
“NEW”????
“SUPER-NEW”???
You don’t have to have a doctorate in astronomy (or Italian) to recognize this for what it is: a mistranslation of nova and supernova.
I mean, just look at the Italian:
Keplero, ad esempio, riteneva che si trattasse di una “nova” o una “supernova” . . .
It’s got the words “nova” and “supernova” right there! And notice it doesn’t have a bare presentation of these words without the indefinite article (un, una = “a, an”). It’s got the indefinite article right in front of both nouns! That tells you these are nouns, not adjectives. “A nova,” not “new”; “a supernova,” not “super-new.”
The translation is so bad that one wonders if the Italian was plopped into a machine translation program or something. If so, it wasn’t Google’s, because that churns out:
Kepler, for example, believed that it was a “nova” or a “supernova” . . .
So, Google’s machine translation wins hands down on this one.
While even Homer nods, it is hard to imagine how such an obviously erroneous translation could be made by someone with a functional grasp of Italian and English, much less how it could survive any kind of review.
This is a big problem and you just have to wonder what is going on in the Vatican to have such bad English translations being churned out. Do they have non-native English speakers doing it? Is there some kind of anti-English faction in the translation service, possibly led by French or Italian speakers who resent the dominance of English? Search me, but it's really annoying. I suspect it's mainly dead time in new-media adaptation (did it really matter that it took a week to get the English translation out before all this instantaneous-news stuff started?), but... annoying.
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