Saturday 28 February 2009

Words to speak of faith - can they be translated?

At KT today we tried to encourage the young people to express their faith - we ended with a bit of time writing confessions of faith you you can find here, en français bien sûr. We read part of the first chapter of John's gospel in depth and then later the parable of the last judgement in Matthew 25. We were trying to get at the deeper meaning behind the words and more importantly what these stories might mean for us.
At one point we were encouraged to beging to express and confess our faith by chosing 5 words from the list below in French. One word and only one was chosen by all eleven of us and only the minister, Bernard, and I chose "doubt" as part of of what we think about when we hear the word "faith". Ah, trust we clergy to undermine everything ;-).
The word everyone chose was the word confiance which could be translated as trust or perhaps as confidence into English, but then I wondered whether I would have chosen trust or confidence so readily in English as I did in French. Avoir la confiance just somehow means so much more than trusting.
Anyway what five words would you choose when you hear the word faith?

Croyance, Certitude, Absence de preuves, Savoir, Espérance, Preuve, Erreur, Science, Confiance, Attente, Crédulité, Conviction, Aveuglement, Tolérance, Adhésion, Intolérance, Vérité, Croyable, doute, Incroyable, Incertitude, Fidélité, Crédible

1 Comment:

janetlees said...

Now this is very good. I'd choose words I like the sound of as much as the meaning. So I choose:
esperance,credulite, adhesion, fidelite and confiance. I agree with what you said about the latter and that is one way in which multiple languges enrich each other.Hope to speak to you soon