Liturgical Translations

Bishop Trautman and the Bishop's Committee on the Liturgy have some problems with the latest draft of the Pauline Missal translation. The article in question is here. The article itself is longer but that's about all that can safely be learned from it; it's a very strange piece.

Bishop Trautman says the new version is full of "problematic passages … phrases [that] were seen as infelicitous to English spoken in the United States". Uh, yes. This is the same Bishop Trautman who thinks the current ICEL Missal, a.k.a., Dick and Jane Go To Mass, is Shakespeare come to life again. And "(h)e also said there were questions about "the intelligibility of some words". This from the same source that isn't at all worried about the intelligibility of aggiornamento, liturgy of the eucharist (in place of "Mass"), pericope, parousia, charism, metanoia, paraclete or (ahem) infelicitous.

The article also includes this bit of wishful thinking: "ICEL, which has translated all the liturgical texts into English in the past 40 years. . . ." Well, just flat out wrong, isn't it. The ICEL has translated, say, 30 to 40% of the liturgical texts into English, or something resembing English. The rest they just made up as they went along.

A prayer for the Clara Vox committee would not go amiss.