Mind your language | 19 August 2006

There will be no deigning, I’m glad to discover, in the new translation of the Mass into English. A contrary rumour was, I think, put about by enemies of the conservative approach taken, after Vatican intervention, by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy. Its chairman is an Englishman, the Bishop of Leeds, Arthur Roche. My husband tells me he is not a baddy but wears a white hat.

The text of the Latin Mass is one long crux for translators. The temptation to use deign comes in the Canon: ‘Nobis quoque peccatoribus famulis tuis … partem aliquam et societatem donare digneris cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus.’ How to render digneris?

Bishop Roche writes, in the Catholic weekly, the Tablet, that ‘“Deign” was greeted with howls of derision from all sides: it was thought to belong to too formal a register.’ Then they tried, ‘Please grant’. This was too informal. So finally, the bishop relates, they ‘settled on “be pleased to grant” which seems to fall between the two’.

Translating prayers for such a solemn ceremony is not like translating a novel, or even the Bible. The translation of the 1970s was done in a hurry, after the Second Vatican Council. The method used was that of ‘dynamic equivalence’.

Dynamic equivalence was invented by Eugene Nida, born in Oklahoma City in 1914. The idea was to render a sentence in terms that would have the same effect on the hearers as the original, even if it didn’t follow it word by word. It leant to the approach of Ronald Knox. Dr Nida used it for language communities that had not encountered the Bible before, which is far from the position of habitual Mass-goers. Bishop Roche says Dr Nida ‘ceased to use’ dynamic equivalence in his later work.