Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Lajos Szőke: Aspects of liturgical languages in Europe

and scholars of other denominations freely make use of each other's work. The technique of Bible-translations came to be determined by the international rules of linguistics and history, and now there cannot be any accusation against Catholics using the Vulgata as their source. But an agreement on the exact wording of the Bible is still ahead and the ecumenical, interconfessional editions claiming it in their titles (e.g. La Bible Oecumenique

, 1969, Catholic, New International Version, 1963, Protestant) are in reality only the start of the process to "truly ecumenical" editions (Bruce, 1979:216). In addition to the doctrinal divergencies, modern Bibletranslations differ in language style, too, preferring either literary, dignified and archaic, or common style. Liturgical languages also reflect this diversity in style. Although Catholic and Protestant liturgical language-use, in general, is based on similar principles influenced by modern theories in "translatorica" (i.e. translation should convey the same meaning for the reader as the original did for its contemporary readers), in practice there are still differencies. One of the reasons for this can be the fact that the Protestants did not jettison phrases, words and grammatical structures established by liturgical or literary tradition (see: Lőrinczy, 1978:390). It is common knowledge that the native language was strongly influenced by the Protestant biblical language in Protestant areas. The modern Hungarian Protestant translation changed the most frequent archaic verb forms and perfective verbal adverbs, but some stylistically archaic passive forms and lexical units still remained: Károli Version, Revised, 1927. Matthew, 28:19 „ Elmenvén ezért, tegyetek tanítványokká minden népeket, megkeresztelvén őket..." New Version, 1975, (Protestant) ,, Menjetek el tehát, tegyetek tanítvánnyá minden népet, megkeresztelve őket..." The archaic perfective verbal adverbs - elmenvén, megkeresztelvén - were changed to -menjetek el -(imperative) and - megkeresztelve - (verbal adverb). The Hungarian Protestants defended the use of the passive voice (rarely used in Hungarian) maintaining that if we avoid using it, the 148