Rosie’s Ramblings – Autumn 2026

Rosie’s Ramblings – Autumn 2026

It seems to be a year for significant anniversaries. On 3rd July James and I celebrated our Golden Wedding. I was delighted that we had three weddings in St Andrew’s in the few weeks around our special day, including Hannah and Sam’s the very next day. We are always happy to have weddings at St Andrew’s so if you are thinking of getting married, or know someone who is, please get in touch.

Another significant anniversary is 30th September when I will have been ordained for 20 years. It’s the date when I was made deacon in 2006 and priested in 2007. So it’s doubly significant for me. In fact it’s trebly significant because, it happens to be International Translation Day - and the feast day of St Jerome who translated the Bible into Latin. Until the pandemic struck in 2020, I was working as a translator and it was a job I really loved. I was blessed to have a career in translation when I did, because there have been seismic changes in the profession with AI threatening to take over!

I started my first job a few weeks after our wedding, working for BP Chemicals on Piccadilly in London. At that time Harraps’ big four-volume French dictionary was still under production. Unfortunately only the first three volumes had appeared – up to the letter R - and as there was no such thing as the Internet, our hearts would sink if we needed to look up a word beginning with S, or T or W etc.!

Yet another highly significant anniversary: this year, 2026 marks the 500th anniversary of the translation of the Bible into English by William Tyndale. Being a translator never put my life at risk but for Tyndale, producing an English version of the Bible so that people could read it in their own language was very dangerous. The religious authorities saw this as a threat; thousands of copies of Tyndale’s Bible were hunted down and burned. Tyndale himself was captured and executed. And yet, the power of his words lives on. Many expressions that he invented have passed into the English language, enriching it immeasurably, and subsequent translations of the Bible are very largely based on Tyndale’s.

Whatever changes occur, in translation or in the world generally, it’s good to remember that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and for ever” or, as rendered by William Tyndale: "Iesus Christ yesterdaye and to daye and the same continueth for ever." Amen