Some Snippets of Liturgical Latin

Hyper-literal translations of well-known phrases.

If you are an English-speaking Catholic who attends liturgies done in Latin (including but not limited to the Traditional Latin Mass), there are certain recurring phrases in the liturgy you might know by heart. You are likely familiar with these phrases in the original Latin, as well as a common English translation of each phrase.

“Mass of St. Gregory the Great” — Master of Portillo — Wikimedia Commons

While the common way of translating many of these phrases is certainly acceptable, I thought it might be helpful to show what an extremely literal translation would look like for each one.

So below are slavishly literal translations of four phrases from the liturgy.

#1. “Dominus vobiscum”

This is often rightly translated as “the Lord be with you.” That’s already a very literal translation.

Interesting to note, this only applies when “you” is plural. So if you were looking to say “the Lord be with you” in the singular — let’s say as a way of signing off a personal letter to someone — it would be “Dominus tecum.” In other words, “tecum” means “with thee” (singular), while “vobiscum” means “with y’all” (plural).

Also worth noting that the verb “be” isn’t actually in the Latin. So an obsessively literal translation would be “the Lord with you.” However, I think it’s clear from context the Latin word “sit” — “may he/she/it be” — is implied. It’s something of a common poeticism in Latin to drop forms of the verb “to be” (“sum, esse, fui, futurum”).

#2: “.. in saecula saeculorum”

This phrase comes at the end of the Gloria Patri prayer, which we know in English as the “Glory Be.” It also shows up in a few other places.

It typically gets translated as “world without end.” That annoys me. Some family members and friends have heard me rant about this.

For starters, “world without end” is a dangling phrase. Whoever came up with that version of the prayer centuries ago decided to omit the words “in the” to be poetic. It’s supposed to read “in the world without end,” but instead it just says “world without end.” Just in terms of English grammar, that phrasing is no bueno.

Then there’s the fact that “[in the] world without end” isn’t the most literal translation. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not half-bad in terms of capturing the general meaning of the original Latin; it’s just less literal than it could be.

The most literal translation is “into the ages of ages.”

Here’s where that gets interesting: the word “saeculum,” or “age,” could also in some contexts refer to a period of 100 years (i.e. a century). So maybe — and this is just speculation on my part — there’s an intentional double meaning of “hundreds of centuries.” That would be another way of saying “tens of thousands of years” — which would just be a poetic way of saying it’s a really, really long time.

So a slightly less literal translation would be something like, “for ages upon ages” or “into ages unending." That sounds a little nicer in English, in my opinion, than “[in the] world without end.”

#3: “… per omnia saecula saeculorum”

This phrase literally translates to, “through all the ages of ages.” You’ll notice it’s very similar to #2 above. They mean the same thing, but the “per omnia …” phrasing is considered more solemn and emphatic.

We do this a little bit in English as well: opt for a longer turn of phrase to sound fancier.

Another note: the phrasing of “saecula saeculorum” is probably, if I recall correctly, a rough approximation of a Hebrew idiom wherein you emphasize a word by repeating.

#4: “Sursum corda / habemus ad Dominum”

I used the slash mark above to distinguish the two halves. The first half is said or sung by the priest, while the the back half is said by the altar boy(s) or sung by the cantors. It’s a call-and-response type of thing, laid out like this:
Priest: “Sursum corda”
Response: “habemus ad Dominum”

Here’s the thing. Normally you see this translated as “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord.” While that’s literal enough, my purpose here is to give you an obsessively literal translation. That would go something like this:
Priest: “Upwards, the hearts”
Response: “we hold them toward the Lord.”

See how weird that sounds in English? The Latin is very poetic and lovely — taking a sentence, cutting it in half, and assigning the first half to the priest and the other half as a response. But the literal translation in English is just strange. So a more interpretive English translation works here quite nicely, in my opinion.

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There are many cases where a translation can be literal without being a slavish word-for-word rendering of the original Latin. In fact, some of the samples given above are clearer in English when translated a bit more loosely.

For those of you who don’t know much about languages, I hope this gives you a feel for the difficult questions translators often face. “Do I go for a slavishly literal translation, and end up with bad English?” “If I want to make it more legible in English, how many tweaks should I make?” “If I make it too natural to modern English, am I changing the meaning of the sentence?”