That safeguards both the pastoral responsibilities of the episcopal conferences in caring for the prayer of the local church, and the role of the Holy See in overseeing the liturgical life of the church throughout the world. It can only be hoped that Cardinal Medina's letter will be refocused. This is essential, since it is of the very nature of translation to communicate faithfully to a given people in their own language, that which the church, by means of this Latin text originally intended to communicate to another people in another time. In his recent letter, Cardinal Medina states that vernacular texts must be accurate and fully convey the content of the original Latin text. The congregation has implied on several occasions that strictly literal translation is the primary goal, and that if the vernacular texts cannot always be immediately understood by those who hear them, explanations can be given afterwards in the homily or by catechesis.
Liturgical translation is an art, more than a science.
It deals primarily with communication. Consider, for example, the fact that the vast majority of texts in our liturgical celebrations are translations from another language. All the texts in the present and proposed Sacramentary, except for some original compositions that are found mostly in the Sunday opening prayers and certain collects for saints, are from the Latin. All the texts from Sacred Scripture are translated from Hebrew, Greek or in a few cases from Aramaic originals. We need to be sensitive to the problems that translators face in trying to bridge the past and the present, classical and contemporary idiom, different cultures, different grammatical and lexical systems.