Francis’ man of many words
The pope’s trusted interpreter is his bridge to international audiences
LONDON — If every word you say is considered by some of your listeners to be divinely inspired — maybe even infallible — what happens if you don’t actually speak their language?
For Pope Francis, now drawing huge crowds on his visit to the United States, the answer lies in the man in the glasses, the unobtrusive black-robed priest who can be seen trailing the pontiff, whispering into his ear and sometimes speaking directly into the mic.
Msgr. Mark Miles is the linguistic bridge between the Spanish-speaking Francis and his English-speaking audiences. He has accompanied the pope on other international trips and been at his side in some illustrious company, including President Obama, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Queen Elizabeth II.
In fact, the queen is Miles’ other leader, at least from a secular perspective: He hails from Gibraltar, the British-ruled rocky outcrop in southern Spain, which also explains why Miles speaks both English and Spanish fluently.
His clipped British accent and his looks have some female fans atwitter — or a-Twitter, the social network on which they’ve shared their avowedly unspiritual devotion. (“Father forgive me,” wrote one admirer; “cutest dimple ever,” cooed another.)
Miles himself prefers to stay out of the spotlight, declining to give interviews. Little is known about the monsignor except that he is 48, attended the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in Rome, the training ground of Vatican diplomats, and had official postings in Ecuador and Hungary. According to the Roman Catholic journal the Tablet, Miles is “affable, bright and hard-working,” sings well and likes to cycle.
Of the 18 speeches Francis is scheduled to deliver in the United States, only four were to be in English, including Thursday’s address to a joint meeting of Congress. The rest he is delivering in his native Spanish.
Miles’ biggest challenge is keeping up with a boss who’s known for going off script. On a stop during a visit to the Philippines in January, Francis decided to rip up his prepared homily in favor of an impromptu address and gave his putupon aide a shout-out: “I have a translator, a good translator!”
That papal penchant for off-the-cuff remarks has at times flummoxed not only Miles but the Holy See’s press office and the team of translators and interpreters whose job it is to render Francis’ utterances into several languages, including Italian, English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. (The pope has Twitter accounts in all those languages. The Spanish one has the most followers, nearly 10 million; English is second with 7 million.)
On more than one occasion, Vatican press aides have scrambled to find out just what it is their boss said somewhere that caused a stir in the media. The most widely quoted statement so far in Francis’ papacy — “Who am I to judge?” in reference to a gay priest — came during a session with reporters aboard the papal plane on a flight home from Brazil. Back on the ground, the Vatican press office, besieged with questions, took days to issue an official Italian transcript.
The Vatican’s translations of those transcripts into other languages are usually marked “unofficial,” frustrating international reporters who cover the pope.
“Very often they miss the point. They miss the nuances,” veteran Vatican correspondent Robert Mickens said of the translations. “I don’t use them. I [do] my own translation. ... The Vatican usually says ‘unofficial translation,’ because they don’t want to take responsibility for getting it wrong.”
The controversy that a single word can generate was demonstrated last year at a special assembly of bishops to discuss family life, including the fraught topics of divorce, remarriage and homosexuality.
A working report issued by the Vatican midway through the conference spoke, in the unofficial English translation, of “valuing” a gay person’s sexual orientation, which immediately made headlines and caused an outcry among conservatives worried that the pope was diluting traditional church teaching. But the word in the original Italian better corresponded to “evaluating” or “assessing.”
Miles’ job at the pope’s side can be even more difficult since his interpretation has to be instant. He’s earned kudos for a style that’s almost akin to Method acting, mimicking the pope’s emphases and inflections and laughing in the same places.
“He does a pretty good job, I have to say,” Mickens said. “Miles knows Spanish and Italian and English, of course, so he triangulates this thing. He’s very good at it.”
But he can be stumped by the pope’s Argentine dialect. At the appearance in the Philippines, according to another Vatican reporter, Francis used the word pollera, which folks in his hometown of Buenos Aires would know means “skirt.” To Miles and most other Spanish speakers, that article of clothing is a falda.
Besides Spanish, the pope, a son of Italian immigrants, is most comfortable in Italian, which remains the lingua franca in the Vatican. The Vatican bureaucracy, still stacked with Italians, resists switching to English in spite of the global nature of the Catholic Church and the growing profile of English as an international tongue.
“The Holy See refuses to countenance that because they believe that it’s an imperialistic language, and that Latin somehow wasn’t,” Mickens said.
(Not that Latin is used much at the Vatican either. Certain ceremonial announcements and documents still get translated into the church’s old official language, and “Papa Franciscus” maintains a Latin Twitter account with 385,000 followers. But as an everyday working language, its days are over.)
For Anglophone Catholics, the only choice remains to rely on interpreters like Miles and on the Vatican’s “unofficial” English versions of the pope’s speeches, homilies and spontaneous comments.
But caveat emptor: Translations can be tricky, and can betray you. As a famous phrase in Italian has it, “Traduttore, traditore.”
In English? “Translator, traitor.”
‘Miles knows Spanish and Italian and English, of course, so he triangulates this thing. He’s very good at it.’ — Robert Mickens, veteran Vatican correspondent