Pope Leo's first words to the world: A semantic and intercultural perspective.

As this article shows, Pope Leo's "first words" – the words with which he opened his encounter with the world as a Pope – are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. In these words the newly elected Pope greets and blesses all people on earth (whom he addresses as "fratelli e sorelle carissimi", "dearest brothers and sisters") with the words spoken by Jesus Christ to his Apostles when they saw him for the first time after his Resurrection. Jesus' words, first spoken in Aramaic and transmitted to us through the Greek of the New Testament, have been translated into thousands of languages. But how have they been translated? And how can they be translated, given that many languages in the world don't have a word comparable to "peace" and that many speech cultures do not have speech genres such as "greetings" and "blessings"? The article seeks to demonstrate that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) based on shared human concepts allows us to articulate, clearly and precisely, messages intended for the whole humanity. In addition, the article illustrates the difficulties involved in cross-cultural and cross-temporal communication with one particularly interesting example, the rendering of Jesus' words "peace to you" in John's Gospel (John 20:19) in the Hawaii Pidgin Bible (2024). Thinking through the problems and challenges that faced the translators and the solutions that they creatively reached for, the article discusses the intricacies of the connections between semantics and pragmatics, translation and interpretation, biblical hermeneutics and intercultural communication across languages, centuries and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]