Since Fr. Joe has opened up the discussion on translations, I thought I would join in. While writing my masters' thesis, I created the table below to compare certain translations of three collects from the Roman Missal. The first column is the Latin. The second is a "traditional" translation of the text taken either from Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1st and 3rd prayers) or from an attempt at one by the historian Eamon Duffy. The third is the ICEL translation from the 1973 Sacramentary, still currently in use. The final column are the revised collects from the ICEL Sacramentarythat was approved in 1997 but rejected by the Congregation for Divine Worship in 2002.

When we compare the 1973 and 1997 translations, it seems clear that the ICELtook to heart some of thecriticisms they received about the 1973 collects. The 1997 versions are more faithful to theoriginal Latin andconvey a number of concepts that were essentially left on the cutting room floor in 1973. What I do not have at my disposal--and would love to see if any readers out there have access to them--are the collects from the same Sundays in the ICEL translation that was just considered by the USCCB.I would like to place them on the chart above and see how much better (or worse, depending on your point of view) they really are.I often find in this debate that critics of the (pre-2001) ICEL continue to refer back to the1973 collects as if there had beenno development since then. That is not the case.Earlyin the revision process, the ICEL conducted a consultation withits member episcopal conferences in which theissue of the "register" of the language of the collects was raised by many bishops. I think there is no question that the1997translations are more "sacral" in character than the ones from 1973. One can still quibble, of course, about whether, for example,a phrase like "enable us to cherish" adequately renders the forcefulness of "fac nos amare." But, by and large, I think the improvement is significant, even if I might quibble with some of the specific decisions.I think this is important because defenders of the Congregation for Divine Worshipsometimes suggest that the promulgation of Liturgiam Authenticam and the restructuring of ICEL were the only way that we were going to get English prayers that werean improvement over those of 1973.I think the historical evidence suggests otherwise.