Speakers
Description
The publication by Pope Francis’s encyclical letter, Laudato Sì, in 2015 addressing the climate crisis marked a major intervention by the Catholic Church in environmental debates. The letter encompassed multiple topics including climate science, consumerism, throwaway culture, poverty, and integral ecology. Given the global reach of both climate change and Catholicism, effectively communicating the Pope’s concerns about threats to ‘our common home’ to a wide audience required extensive translation enterprise. In institutional translation endeavours, a major challenge is the translation of neologisms (Awadh and Shafiull, 2020). While most large multilingual institutions adhere to explicit guidelines and protocols in order to normalize and standardize terminology for translation (Koskinen, 2011), this does not seem to be the case with the Vatican, which translates into more than 30 languages daily, constituting perhaps the largest translation endeavour worldwide. This case study discusses the challenges in identifying and describing neologisms, as defined by Newmark (1985), across five languages (English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Italian) in Laudato Sì, a letter containing 93,185 words. Relying on a corpus-based approach with Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014), we identify candidates to neologisms by searching for quotation marks, terminology lists and hapax legomena. We confirm the neology status by crosschecking with criteria proposed by Cabré and Sager (1999): recent emergence, dictionarization, instability, and user perception. We discuss the hurdles faced in identifying the lexical changes within terms from the environmental domain that acquire new senses in the religious institution, such as the case of ecological conversion, an ecological term whose meaning is to change the state of an environment into another, that for the church means “to undergo a transformation of heart and mind, restoring our relationships with each other, with creation and with God.” Lastly, we address the difficulties arising in case of systematizing these neologisms in a database for internal documentation. Our findings provide insights on the strategies employed to transfer neologisms across languages and demonstrate how the Catholic Church employs and adapt existing environmental terminology to the religious domain to convey its message. Our pilot study also reveals the difficulty of detecting neologisms with current corpus-based tools in either a semi- or fully automatic manner, besides showing that the criteria for determining neologism status needs to be updated in the light of the fast-paced information landscape we have been living on.
