Later this year the Roman Catholic Church in most of the English-speaking world will begin to pray with a new translation of the original Latin texts in its eucharistic liturgy. The present translation, in use for more than four decades, was based in part upon the principle of ‘dynamic equivalence’—what phrasing would have a comparable effect on a native speaker of the language into which the translation is being made as the original words would have on one who spoke that language. This could, and did, lead on occasion to translations that seemed to some to be distant from the Latin, and it has been decided that something more literal is required. If this means that familiar words are replaced with less familiar, perhaps more technical, ones, it is argued that this provides an excellent opportunity for education. This change has not been uncontroversial. The difference between the existing translation and the one that replaces it raises fundamental questions about how human beings communicate their experience of the sacred to one another, and how this communication becomes enshrined in a common language. This issue of The Way does not enter directly into the controversy about the new liturgical translation—to many of our readers this might seem a parochial affair, by which they are little affected. But many of the articles to be found here share a concern with making age-old spiritual themes comprehensible to a contemporary audience.
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