austraLasia
1452
Prevention, not
repression
The good news-the bad news-the good
news
ROME: 17th February 2006 -- The good news is that
Fr Peter Braido's major work on the preventive system, Prevenire, non
reprimere, has been translated into English. The bad news is that, in
immortal words quoted earlier, or along those lines at least, 'the effort needs
to be reworded'! The good news is that this is underway and you can
already begin with what has been done, the which can
be found on Bosconet under the rubric of Useful
texts.
It seems a shame that one of the best studies
in existence on Don Bosco's preventive system has not been available to
English-only readers, but the translation of Italian academic texts is a
daunting task. Fr Vincent Zuliani SUE (a province not a congregation!) God
bless his sterling soul, did a first run through on the translation several
years ago and it got lost in paperwork somewhere. By his own admisson it
needed several more 'run throughs', besides, it is in barely digital form minus
the footnotes, and these make up a substantial part of the text, so they simply
have to be added in. But the English speaking world is going to owe a
great debt of gratitude to this good man.
In the
meantime, there is work to be done. The text has to be stripped back to
plain text and reformatted to remove all kinds of unsightly gaps that crept in
to the first 'run through'. That's a minor and relatively simple technical
task, but time-consuming. Then it needs to be re-read and in places
re-written. It is eminently faithful to Braido's Italian, and now needs to
become eminently faithful to a universal English readership. Again,
time-consuming. Finally - no not finally, but an important third, the
footnotes need to be added in and Italian footnoting for academic texts is quite
different from that of Chicago or Turabian! Yet
again, time-consuming.
Assuming that the above is done in
spare time, and given some experience already of the above three tasks, you can
assume a week per chapter. There are 19 chapters, so we are looking at
something like 5 months. July should see the task completed. In the
meantime, you can watch work in progress, and benefit from it. Of course,
in the interests of fair dealing, it may be unethical to make all the chapters
available in Bosconet, but while my conscience remains flexible, profit by
it. The introduction and Chapter 1 are done. A weekly reminder
of progress on other chapters will be forthcoming.
Now,
there could be even better news. If someone would be prepared to take just
a chapter, and reduce the load a bit (they would, of course, need access to the
Italian 1999 edition, but that's not too difficult to come by), the job could be
done a lot quicker. Any takers? I would be prepared to offer
appropriate guidelines and ensure an overall consistency....in other words, you
too may get reworded, but there is no question the job would be completed and
into the hands of a publisher in something less than five months. That has
to be good news for English-only readers. Please note that what you will
be reading in Bosconet is not a final version, but it will be the
last-but-final. Any comments whatsoever will be
welcomed.
GLOSSARY
the which: no, not an error,
though a touch archaic.
Chicago or Turabian: two
of the most widely accepted English language academic style
manuals.
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