...the prayer said by millions around the world and down the centuries. The prayer said by children at night, by frightened soldiers on a battlefield, by lonely old people muddled and unhappy, by Christians of all denominations, by anyone and everyone who cherishes the spiritual realities that have shaped minds and hearts for two millenia...but apparently unknown to the young man chosen by the BBC to report the election of a new Pope. The young man stumbled and eventually gave up when trying to say this prayer. Do watch the ghastly, humiliating reality of the voice of modern Britain: the BBC can't even get some one who knows the Lord's Prayer.
We desperately - and I do mean desperately - need a New Evangelisation.
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9 comments:
Your criticism may be unfair. The translator seems be speaking in an accented voice. I would speculate that he might be a native Italian and so would not know precisely the traditional English words of the Lord's prayer but is constructing an impromptu translation.
Yes it did sound dreadful but to be fair, the translator was obviously not a native English speaker and not that fluent in English - he may well have been able to say the Our Father perfectly well in his own language (presumably Italian)but was unfamiliar with the traditional English wording. They should have asked one of the lads from the English College to translate, as I did, on occasion! But it does remind me of the time a well-educated British trainee journalist from a presumably Christian background asked me, "What's Holy Communion?"
Let me just be charitable toward the translator. It struck me that the man was not a native English speaker. It's quite possible that he knows the Our Father in his native tongue and not in English but forced to translate it came out too literal a translation.
But then again I could be wrong.
I had a laugh at that Joanna. The poor translator must be embarrassed though for his ignorance.....
Julia
A C of E reader here, Auntie Joanna, who follows your blog with great interest and enjoyment...
I watched the balcony scene live last night, and was very moved - but I just couldn't believe it about that translation of the Our Father. In fact it was a few minutes before I realised it was the Our Father at all!
To be fair, this man appears to be a poorly skilled non-English translator, not a native English speaker who doesn't know the Lord's Prayer. His accent is not English and most of his translation was limited to substituting English for Italian words, with poor grasp of English sentence structures throughout. He could no more provide the familiar English wording of the Our Father than translate poetry adequately on sight. If this chap knows the prayers, it is in his native language. His performance tells us nothing about the need for evangelisation in the UK, but it does tell us that the BBC might have done well to use a native English speaker to translate on this occasion.
This is a perfectly reasonably way to translate the prayers from Italian into English - though his translating skills are clearly not rapid and he is also obviously not bilingual. There are lots of English and American people I know in Rome at the moment who speak Italian and perhaps they would have been a better choice to cover the event. However, the lack of an ability of Italians to translate prayers into English says nothing about modern Britain as far as I can see.
Thinking about it, this could possibly have been an official simultaneous translator provided for English speakers by whoever provided the TV feed - Italian TV, the Vatican? - and not the BBC's fault. It had that sort of ring to it. But that's getting a bit technical!
Alenka - some of the footage was definitely provided directly by Vatican TV. The person heard translating may well have had no conntection at all either to the BBC or to Britain.
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