How we can receive more from the Mass - 11
Languages and translation are more complex than we might imagine. We all know how the English of Shakespeare, who was writing over 400 years ago, is so very different to the English that we use today. Go back another 200 years to the second half of the 14 th Century, and the vast majority of us simply wouldn’t understand Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. When abroad, have you ever seen signs that have been translated into English for the tourists, but done so poorly and maybe with unintended comical results? Or try this: type an English sentence into an app to get a Spanish translation; then take that translation and translate it into German; and then take that translation and translate it back into English. The likelihood is that you will not have the same sentence as you started with, and it may have turned out to be very different. One more anecdote…modern Mexicans have a saying: “The donkey talking about ears.” It’s a cultural idiom that make