See earlier posts: part one and part two.
Reliable sources out there are sending us things about the new missal text, and it keeps getting curiouser. The Prayer after Communion we’d all hear on roll-out Sunday in the US, according to the planned timeline, is there in English as you’d expect. But then, four pages later, the exact same prayer in Latin appears again, but in English this time it’s an entirely different translation! One of the two English versions makes sense, so at least there’s that. (Plan to go to daily Mass that Thursday to get the good version – it’s more like what the conferences submitted.)
You perhaps already noticed in the 2008 recognitio text of the Roman canon that “suisque omnibus,” which appears once in Latin, appears twice in the English translations, three lines apart, each time as “and all who are dear to them.” Mistakes happen. But this is odd: the redundancy has been retained in the final text.
I think I see a translation principle at work here. When the same Latin text appears in two places in the missal, two different English translations are permitted. But when a Latin text appears only once, each repetition in English, because such repetition is not found in the Latin original, must appear in the exact same English wording. Do you think that’s it?
A Pray Tell reader reports that “simili modo” in the Institution Narrative of the various Eucharistic prayers is treated curiously in the final text. In most of the 10 Eucharistic prayers the English is “In a similar way.” But in two cases the English is “In the same way.” This fits perfectly with the translation principle discovered above. Same, similar – homo, homoi – I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
Please leave a reply.