By David Owen
November 26 – Swansea’s footballing stature has been on the rise in recent times, courtesy of the stylish play that has carried Michael Laudrup’s men to the Premier League and a trophy – last season’s Capital One Cup. Now the Welsh city has added another unique feather to its footballing cap: it is the home of Wolfestone, the company entrusted with the job of translating the Pope’s copy of The FIFA Weekly into Latin.
It was an unusual assignment, to put it mildly. “We were very, very surprised, but also delighted to be working with FIFA,” account manager Andrew Hastie told me. “Anything that we do in Latin does tend to be for the church.”
It was also a job with a very tight deadline: FIFA’s Perikles Monioudis came up with the idea just a week before his boss Sepp Blatter was expected at the Vatican, yet, according to Hastie, the task of dealing with around 14,000 words would normally take a translator roughly a week and a half.
Consequently, Hastie says, Wolfestone asked a partner university to machine-translate and post-edit the text.
This enabled the assignment to be completed by close of business on Wednesday, less than 48 hours before the FIFA president’s audience – in spite of the added complication of needing to come up with Latin texts of similar length to the originals so that the same page layout could be used.
“They needed to write into our content management files,” Monioudis says.
The FIFA man emphasises that it was never the intention to “make a translation that can function as a reference to scholars”. And scrolling through the 40 pages, you quickly notice the appearance of familiar English words such as “budget”, “tournament” and “sidelines”.
But use of the Roman numerals system for dates gives an authentic touch. And if I were Egypt coach Bob Bradley, I would be tempted to add the page highlighting my resonant assertion, “Scyphus est spes orbis terrarum ad nostrum fecerunt in unum”* to my personal scrapbook.
“We wanted to make something witty, intelligent and grown-up,” Monioudis says. “We tried to put Latin back on the map of spoken languages by bringing a copy of our magazine to our fellow football fan in the language that is the so-called lingua franca in the Vatican.”
Certainly, any Latin teacher with a class struggling to tell their ablatives from their gerunds could do worse than enlist the help of Ibrahimovic and Ronaldo by downloading the Pope’s magazine from the FIFA website.
· “The dream of going to the World Cup is what kept our team united.”
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