It is possible to translate from a language you don't understand to a language you don't understand. In fact, computers do this all the time and we all know how accurate Google Translate is (not very much).
But yes, if I had a Russian Arabic dictionary and a basic outline of Arabic and Russian grammar I could translate a text from Arabic to Russian even though I do not know either Arabic or Russian. I wouldn't know what the text said or what it meant but I could render a possible translation of that text into Russian.
But would any of you rely on that translation for anything? No, and it would be foolish to do so. Yet, this seems to be the exact process that happened when the Vatican created the Nova Vulgata.
Before the Nova Vulgata, there was the Vulgate of Saint Jerome. There had been Latin translations of the bible before Jerome but they were produced by various people in various places at various times and from various sources, which of course all makes it sound like the outcome had various degrees of quality.
Then Jerome comes onto the scene. He was first tasked with making a good translation of the New Testament from Greek to Latin and so he did so. That translation was pretty good due to the fact that Jerome was a native speaker of both Greek and Latin. He of course was not the only person with that status back then and his work was scrutinized and criticized by others which helped make Jerome's translation the best it could be. If there was a huge error in Jerome's work, the historical texts would tell us.
After the New Testament, Jerome moved onto the Psalms. First he revised the Latin translations of the Psalms that already existed but this work was deemed not good enough. So then Jerome translated the Psalms again from the Greek Old Testament that Christians had been using since the time of Christ himself. That translation was pretty good but while he was translating the Psalms, Jerome got an idea that maybe making a translation from a translation was not a good thing. Maybe he should go and translate the Psalms from the original Hebrew. Well, Jerome didn't speak Hebrew, so what was he going to do?
The answer for Jerome was to move to Bethlehem, learn to speak Hebrew by living his daily life speaking Hebrew. He spent 20 years living with the Israelis, speaking Hebrew everyday and then he translated the Psalms again, from the original Hebrew.
By then the version of the Psalms that he'd made from the Greek was already popular and after a lot of people looked at this new work, they didn't see any obvious improvements that would entice them that the translation from Hebrew was better. Jerome himself insisted it was better and to show them, he then translated most of the Old Testament from Hebrew instead of the Greek.
Now, today, we might wonder what a translation of the Old Testament from the Greek might have been like. But alas, we never got that, at least not from Jerome. What we got instead was a translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew after Jerome became fully fluent in the language.
But there was a problem. Not all of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Some of it was written in Greek, one small section in Latin, and several large parts in ... gasp ... Aramaic, the language of Christ himself.
At first, Jerome didn't want to bother with these parts, figuring that the Hebrew was what mattered. He seemed to have adopted this idea that Hebrew was better than all other languages and the Aramaic of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was inferior.
Well the Church did not agree. Languages are languages, it is the message that is important not the paper it is written on or the language it is written in.
Well, Jerome could do the Greek parts well enough (the Latin not needing to be translated) but what could he do about the Aramaic? Should he translate from the Greek translation? Jerome decided not to. He found a helper who knew both Aramaic and Hebrew and another helper who knew both Aramaic and Greek. With their help, he got close enough to understanding what the Aramaic said to render a very good Latin translation with the caveat that he was translating sense for sense not word for word.
Those translations were accepted and the Latin Vulgate was formed consisting of a New Testament translated from the original Greek to Latin, the original Hebrew to Latin, and the original Aramaic to Latin through cross reference, double checking, and due diligence.
Jerome wanted his Psalms translated from Hebrew to be the ones that were used. They were not. Instead, his decades earlier translation from Greek was retained and even today, when put under examination, that translation holds up as the superior version.
In every age, again and again, people looked back over Jerome's work because in the story of how Jerome translated the Bible there is the little inkling of something that nags at us. Why didn't he translate the Old Testament from the Greek? Why are we using the a translation from Greek for the Psalms instead of the Hebrew? Why did he not like the language that Jesus himself spoke? All of this causes suspicions that perhaps Jerome was not as pious as we would have liked and further that this allowed some corruption to enter into the text.
So time and again people have gone back over Jerome's work and scrutinized it. In fact, this started when he was still alive and even after Jerome was declared a saint and his work had the official stamp of approval from pope after pope, that scrutiny continued. It is as if every generation refuses to just be told that Jerome's translation is the best one and they have to go behind the Church and check it and come to that understanding themselves. It is akin to how someone studying Latin gets good enough to start to be able to read the text for the liturgy and they begin to feel that maybe the Mass of Paul VI is invalid. So they learn more and double check until they eventually come to the realization that the Mass of Paul VI is good enough to be valid (if only just barely).
For Catholics, a document having the official Vatican stamp of approval was never the ultimate criteria for us to consider something good enough for our faith. Christ is the standard and we are always trying to make sure the Church is good enough.
So over the centuries, Jerome's work has been checked and double checked and argued over. The work had to again and again reaffirm its place as the best Latin version of the Bible. Over time, new translations of the Bible into Latin were created but none were as good as Jerome's and that had nothing to do with the Vatican giving Jerome's work its stamp of approval. Even as recently as Pius XII, they tried to change the Psalms to a newer translation but it didn't take off. When compared side by side with Jerome's work, Jerome wins out every time with the lone exception of Psalm 94 where an unnamed translator from the age before Jerome created the version that even Jerome could not match and so that lone Psalm is included in the Latin translation though it was not from Jerome.
Now, compare that storied history of the Latin Vulgate to the Nova Vulgata, the current translation that has the Vatican's stamp of approval.
The men who created the Nova Vulgata did not speak Greek. They did not speak Hebrew. They did not speak Aramaic. They did not even speak Latin. They were 'scholars' who had university degrees in these subjects they way I have a university degree in Political Science which I do not use.
More over, they were not using the original source texts of the Bible in the original languages to create the Nova Vulgata even though that was what the Pope told them to do. They defied the Pope's instructions and did not use the original Greek of the New Testament that has been safely guarded by the Catholic Church. They did not even use the version of the New Testament that the Melkite Church uses. They did not even use the version of the New Testament that the Greek Orthodox Church uses. No. They instead decided to use an edited and shorter version of the New Testament that protestants use. PROTESTANTS.
But so what if protestants supplied the text so long as it is the correct text, right? Sure, but it's not the correct text. The protestants edited the text and cut out words or even verses that they didn't like.
So why would Catholic scholars who are charged with making a Latin translation of the Bible use a protestant edit? Follow the money. The Bible Society that supplied the text gave a large sum of money to several of the scholars, not all of whom were Catholic. The scholars then decided to use the protestant Bible Society's text of the Bible, old and new testaments. Then, since the new translations is a derivative of the Bible Society's version that is under copyright and not the ancient original version which is in the public domain, every time the Vatican sells a copy of the Nova Vulgata or uses the verses in the Nova Vulgata for the Missale Romanum or the Divine Office; the Church has to pay a royalty to the protestant Bible Society. The Nova Vulgata is a scam to funnel money away from Catholics and give it to protestants.
Of course, paying would not be so bad if the Nova Vulgata was an acceptable translations, but it's not. It is evident on ever page, indeed, every LINE of the Nova Vulgata that the translators did not fully understand the Greek or Hebrew texts and weren't good enough with Latin to actually write a proper Latin sentence. Reading through the Nova Vulgata I'm often struck with the thought that even I, David Billiot, could have done better. There are so many errors, one after another. Leaving words out, misspellings, grammar mistakes, using the wrong word, many times just typing the letters in the wrong order. I want to pull my hair out.
The men writing the Nova Vulgata were not Latin native speakers. They were not Greek native speakers, nor Hebrew, nor Aramaic. They were guys who had a grammar book and some dictionaries and they were making a translations. That translations into Latin has so many grammatical, lexical, and typographical errors in it as to render it USELESS. It's like they were children who found their father's gun and didn't know what it was or how to use it. Add on top of that the fact that protestants are stealing our money every time the Church prints off another copy of the Nova Vulgata and laughing all the way to the bank.
But if you try to express this knowledge to the Church hierarchy they don't want to hear it. Just use the English, they say, though they don't say which of the many, many English translations to use. They say the Nova Vulgata is here to stay and they won't entertain any criticism of it. But the Nova Vulgata won't stand the test of time the way Jerome's work has. Even before the Nova Vulgata was finished being published, people who actually know Latin and actually SPEAK Latin started to make it known that this work was very sub par. It is telling that the original plan for the Nova Vulgata was to only publish the sixty six books book the protestants could supply them with and not the full seventy three books of the bible. They backtracked on that and found a way to mangle the remaining seven books as well, even spelling the name of Tobit wrong in a few places. After all, it's not like the very book he appears in has his name as the title. Oh, wait, it does.
So in conclusion, don't use the Nova Vulgata unless you'd be fine letting your life depend on a translations that I could make from Arabic to Russian. Don't let the Vatican's stamp of approval fool you. If you want the Bible in Latin, get the Vulgate. The Clementine Vulgate is the best one I know of and is the closest to what we know Jerome himself wrote. As for me, I trust the work of someone who had to defend his work and who was a native speaker or at least fluent in the languages he was using. Language translation is not a math problem where you plug in some numbers and get an answer. You have to know what you're saying and the people who made the Nova Vulgata did not.
