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Intercultural communication

Condoms in translation

By November 28, 2010November 27th, 2020No Comments4 min read7,946 views
Condoms in translation

Condoms in translation

It’s been impossible to escape this week’s media coverage of the pope’s comments about condoms and male prostitutes. There has been a lot of debate about what he really said in the German original and about the quality of the translations into English and Italian. I thought there might be some interesting language-on-the-move problem à la “What did Chancellor Merkel really say?” involved and went to investigate. However, it turns out that it’s obscure in whichever language you look at it.

Here is the story: Global media coverage has it that the pope has loosened the church’s ban on condom use for the faithful. The pope now says that using a condom is ok in exceptional cases – the exceptional case being a male prostitute. Male sex workers who are devout Catholics  merit a 10 on a scale of exceptionality from 1 to 10. However, if you change your position, you have to start somewhere: in the 18th century, the flock must have been heartened when the Catholic church lifted its blanket ban on the printing of heliocentric books and must have seen it as a sign that one day even the church would come round to recognizing that the earth was round. Similarly, today the faithful are feeling heartened by this sign that the Catholic church will eventually come to accept that condom use is a simple means of birth control and a simple way to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Of course, with the Catholic church being the organization it is, not everyone is thrilled with this nod in the direction of the obvious. George Pell, the archbishop of Sydney, for instance, seemed to say in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald that the pope had been misunderstood, misquoted and mistranslated, and scoffed:

I have not seen the German original of what the Pope said but […]

All Cardinal Pell needs to do is google the German excerpt. So here it is, from a German Catholic site:

Es mag begründete Einzelfälle geben, etwa wenn ein Prostituierter ein Kondom verwendet, wo dies ein erster Schritt zu einer Moralisierung sein kann, ein erstes Stück Verantwortung, um wieder ein Bewusstsein dafür zu entwickeln, dass nicht alles gestattet ist und man nicht alles tun kann, was man will.

According to the Catholic World Report, this has been translated into English as follows:

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.

I can’t find any fault with the translation. The sentence is as difficult to understand in German as it is in English, and “Prostituierter” clearly refers to a “male prostitute” despite the fact that some bloggers have been speculating that the fact that German has grammatical gender means that “Prostituierter” (m.) can refer both to female and male prostitutes. It cannot. “Prostituierte” (f.) is one of the few terms for people where the feminine rather than the masculine form is the unmarked form.

Either way, the discussion is as consequential as the one about how many angels fit on the pin of a needle. The Vatican has since clarified that the gender of “Prostituierter” doesn’t matter because the pope meant to be inclusive of male, female, and even transsexual prostitutes:

“I personally asked the pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine,” Lombardi said. “He told me: ‘No.'”

Lombardi said the key point was: “It’s the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship … This is if you’re a woman, a man, or a transsexual.” (from The Guardian)

My Catholic father used to say that Catholicism was great until the church gave up Latin. When they started to use vernacular languages in the 1960s you could understand what they were talking about and it turned out to be a real disappointment.

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

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