[Adapted from a longer article to appear in the Oxford Handbook of the Book of Common Prayer (fall 2025) under the title “The Challenges of Translating Liturgies”.]
My life has been a constant exercise in translation. Born into a French-speaking family in the United States, I did not speak English until I started school. Over the years, I have formally studied several languages, and through my ministry I have been exposed to others.
Translating the fact of language
The field of the study of translation as a science — “translatology” or “traductologie”[1] — is only sixty years old, although people have been translating ever since humans and our languages emerged from the various lines of hominids that preceded our species. Translation has always required knowledge of both the source language and the target language. Simultaneous translation, such as is practiced at meetings of the United Nations and the European Union, is better described as “interpretation.” The various sign languages for the hearing-impaired are also interpretation. A goodtranslation is not only linguistic; it is also cultural, the matrices out of which both the source and target languages arose and continue to develop.
While there is considerable discussion whether Neanderthals had the equivalent of our linguistic ability…
