The Translation of Immortale Dei

The Confraternity of Christ the King was very happy to have released its original translation of the great encyclical of Pope Pius IX, Quas Primas, recently, and sincerely hopes that it will be a valuable resource for the English-speaking Church. However, the release prompted many people to ask, “Why did they do a new one?” The original Latin text is available on the Vatican's website, and an English translation is already there. So what was the point of a new one?

The first answer to this is very prosaic: we don't know what the rights of the Vatican's translation might be. Copyright law can be very tricky in the best of circumstances, and given that the Vatican's translation has no named translator, no named copyright holder, and no date, it is essentially impossible to determine what the rights might be. The Confraternity wanted a translation that it could freely distribute; the only option was to make a new one.

The second is a little more concerning: the transcriptions of the Latin text are often quite bad. We haven't checked into the transcription of Quas Primas in particular, but we have noticed some pretty poor copy-editing in the Latin versions, which means that someone attempting to use them will often be stymied. While we haven't done a real check, just looking at the “above-the-fold” part of Quas Primas reveals such goofs as «monuimns» and «terrarnm», which, while not incomprehensible, are at the very least difficult to read. One suspects that the transcription was done by a computer and never actually checked by a human eye, at least not by one which understands much Latin.

The third answer, though, is most worrisome: the Vatican translations sometimes just aren't any good.

We hasten to add to that bold statement that, in the case of Quas Primas, the translation is fine. It's not particularly good, but it's fine; it doesn't deceive the faithful. The meaning of the words is substantially the same as the original Latin. However, there is more to it than that.

The translation is very loose; indeed, it's often pretty hard to tell what sentence in the English relates to what sentence in the Latin. Latin is an inflected language that is often given to lengthy sentences, so it makes sense that the translation will sometimes split them into more English-like chunks; this in itself is neither surprising nor alarming. However, the interpretation of the Latin into English very often is so loose that one must labor to find what part of the Latin text is being translated.

It is often said that the best translation reads as if originally written in the target language. All other things being equal, that may be true; but the farther apart the source and target languages are, the less likely that this type of translation will be possible. English to German, for example, is quite amenable to a translation like this; they are both descended from the same parent languages and haven't diverged too much in this regard. Latin to English, though, makes this quite a bit harder; English is not descended from Latin, though it is a distant cousin, and the grammar and vocabulary differ significantly. At a greater distance—say, Latin to Chinese, or Greek to Arabic—a “native-like” translation will almost certainly be impossible.

Consider the Scriptures, translated from the original Hebrew and Greek into Latin by St. Jerome. These are not idiomatic Latin. They can't be; the source languages and the target language are too far apart. One can read any significant passage of the Vulgate and instantaneously know that it is not natively written in Latin; not only is it chock-full of direct borrowings—“amen”, “baptizare”, and so forth—but its very structure is different. Take a very simple statement from the Gospel of Mark:

Fuit Joannes in deserto baptizans, et prædicans…

This is very easily translated as such:

John was in the desert baptizing, and preaching…

But an original Latin text would never have been phrased that way; it almost certainly would have used an imperfect construction, such as “Joannes in deserto baptizabat”; pairing a gerund with a form of “to be” in this way was simply not done. But it made for the most direct and faithful translation of the Greek, so Jerome did it anyway, even though it doesn't sound natively Latin.

So while a translation needs to be comprehensible to a native speaker of the target language, it need not—and indeed, sometimes cannot—be unrecognizable as a translation. There is a balance to be struck here by the interpreter: a natural sound as far as possible, but a faithful translation before all.

The Vatican translations too often fall far on the side of natural sound at the cost of a faithful translation.

As noted, most of the time this doesn't change meaning, and I won't examine our translation of Quas Primas to demonstrate it. However, as we work on a translation of Immortale Dei, by Leo XIII, a few examples spring into sight.

First, let us look at one in which the import of the original Latin is clearly represented in the translation, but the precision of the translation is lacking. First, the Latin:

De religione autem putare, nihil inter formas dispares et contrarias interesse, hunc plane habet exitum, nolle ullam probare judicio, nolle usu.

This is translated on the Vatican's website as follows:

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice.

Does this get across the Latin's meaning? Absolutely, yes. Is it precise? Absolutely, no. A literal translation would be something like the following:

To think about religion that nothing lies between unlike and contrary forms, clearly has this result: to not want to examine anything in judgment, to not want [to examine anything] in use.

The distinctions here are important. While the Vatican's translation indicates that denying substantial differences between religions practically means rejecting religion entirely, it neglects an important point of the original: that any entity which acknowledges that one religion is true and the others false must examine, in judgment, those principles, and use those which it finds worthy. That includes the state itself; that is, the state itself, when it recognizes the truth of Catholicism, must look at things that develop, judge them in the light of the faith, and determine what to do about them. Obviously, as we see later in the text, it relies on the Church for this task, but it's a truly important point that the Vatican's translation completely misses.

Every so often—very rarely—the translation is simply wrong. One example is in what the Vatican translation numbers as paragraph 18 in, once again, Immortale Dei. The translation cites that “it is felt that” certain things should pertain to the respect of citizens for the state. However, the Latin is quite a bit more specific: “omnino ad justitiam pertinere illa intelliguntur": “it is understood that these things pertain entirely to justice”. In other words, Pope Leo is not just drawing a conclusion; he is delivering a fundamentally moral teaching. Doing these things (e.g., revering the majesty of princes, being subject to public power, refusing sedition) are owed in justice, a moral virtue. This is pretty significant variance.

An even more egregious example lies in the discussion of a “passion for innovation” (more properly an “eagerness of new things”, “rerum novarum studia”) which caused a real confusion in Christianity, which spread then to philosophy and then to politics. Pope Leo states that this started in the fourteenth century, using the Roman numerals “XIV” as is usual in Latin documents.

The Vatican's translation, though, gets it simply wrong, and translates this as the sixteenth century, as if the Latin text read “XVI”. This would be an easy enough mistake to make, of course—one merely reverses two digits—but it makes a huge difference in the text.

In the sixteenth century, of course, we had Martin Luther and the Protestants running roughshod over Christendom, and these were indeed very bad things—things that Pope Leo would certainly condemn, as well.

In the fourteenth century—the century to which Leo was actually referring—the change was much more subtle. Confusion in religion didn't come through mighty heresiarchs overthrowing five of the sacraments and the entire structure of the Church. No; it came from John Wycliffe, English heretic who called for the divestment of Church property, condemned indulgences, and denied Transubstantiation. It came from John Hus, Czech heretic, who also opposed Transubstantiation and argued that the Scriptures were the sole source of truth. However, the real beginning of all this, the inspiration for these heretics who blazed the trail for the Luthers, Zwinglis, and Calvins of the world, is William of Ockham—not a heretic, but one whose theological and philosophical speculations ignored tradition and put him at substantial risk of heresy, and which led the way to men like Wycliffe and Hus.

Ockham, at the cusp of the fourteenth century, decided that the rules of theology and philosophy that had come before him were just wrong, and that he knew better. He denied the existence of universals, and therefore of substances; this meant that Transubstantiation, though not denied by him, was deprived of its internal consistency. Ockham's errors were much more subtle than Luther's, and even than Wycliffe's and Hus's; Leo is blaming our modern woes on dilution of the tradition passed down to us, not on its outright denial.

This kind of translation error is easy to make, but egregious; it changes the entire import of the paragraph. Pope Leo isn't saying that a wholesale rejection of the Church, the hierarchy, and theology caused our modern problems; he's saying that an Ockhamite confusion, the nontraditional tweaking of philosophical and theological presumptions, threw everything off kilter. He's reminding us that our political models are not the heroes of the Counterreformation, or those who kept Protestantism at bay; it's those who upheld the Church and upheld tradition. It's Louis IX, not Louis XIV.

So, the takeaways: the Confraternity will likely continue to produce original translations of certain papal documents, and the original Latin text will always be published with the translation; this keeps us honest, and enables all to more easily see what the original import might be. And it is always a good idea to study Latin, to whatever degree one might be able to. Latin is not only the language of the Church; it is the language of Christendom, the common tongue that enabled the greatest flowering of the doctrine of Christ the King. And, finally, the Confraternity will always point out what it thinks to be important nuances—or, when occasion requires, errors—in the predominant translations. The faithful deserve no less.

Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!