“la parole exportée”

As a French translator, I am constantly on the lookout for innovative or simply intelligent ways to fight some of the most pervasive “anglicisms”. This is NOT a rear-guard battle to protect the “purity” of the French language. Quite often, the word-for-word translation of some English phrases into French only provides meaningless copy, and if your client’s aim is to convince French-speaking people to buy their stuff, be it products or services, or simply to try and influence decisions, you’d better make sure that their message is explicit and their copy “speaks” to people, not just to their assumed knowledge of English.

Which is why, as I was pondering how to translate “make a difference” for a poster today, I hit Google and found this wonderful service from Quebec’s Banque de dépannage linguistique:

http://66.46.185.79/bdl/gabarit_bdl.asp?id=2617

I am very appreciative of the work done by our French-speaking Canadian colleagues. Too often, Canadian French is derided in France, because in some respects their French has taken a different course to ours. But they are also making a more conscious effort to preserve our common language.

“To make a difference” is a good example. I often see this used and/or translated in France as “faire une différence”, a straight and meaningless translation. Some people go for “faire la différence”, which has different meanings. Switching “little” words, a common mistake, might sound like a small inconsequential change, but it isn’t, similar to another frequent example, “mettre à jour” and “mettre au jour”. “Mettre à jour” means “to update,” “to change,” “mettre au jour” means “to place in broad daylight,” “to uncover”.

I do sympathize with non-French speakers who find these nuances difficult to grasp. When we learn English, we have similar problems with pospositions. Think for instance of the difference between “to give in” and “to give up”.

OK, languages change over time, and maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time, these mistakes will have become mainstream. But for the time being, they are not, and I feel that my duty as a translator is not to drive this kind of change.

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I’m reminded of the following anecdote by a blog post written by Werner Patels.

It goes to show how obsessed with acronyms translators can be. Once upon a time, I interpreted at a rather hard meeting and at breaktime, we were lucky to get hold of the printout of the next presentation.

On one page, there was a diagram of a process, with, right in the middle of the page, in big bold evenly-spaced letters, this *acronym*:

E C H E C

So I asked the speaker: What does this stand for?

He looked at me with a funny look, and seemed a little uneasy.

So I asked again, in my best professional voice.

So he laughed. What? You don’t know what ECHEC means?

That was NOT an acronym, it was a REAL word!

Ever heard of the word ‘failure’? That’s what ‘échec’ means. If you didn’t do this properly, the process failed.

Of course I knew the word. But when you have very little time to talk to a speaker before his presentation, you tend to go for very technical words and acronyms.

What a laugh! (and how I hate to look so stupid! )

Bernard Hoepffner, a translator, has the honor of the media this week. He was on the French public radio this morning, for 45 minutes of pure listening pleasure for translators. A few quotes:

‘Translators are the best readers…. We read down to every comma…’

‘When you translate, you try to replicate the writer’s eye, and ear, and hand… up to the point where you feel you could almost “write” the original… Of course it’s not true, but you often get that impression…’

‘Something is so universal in this book…’

‘There’s a paradox: the original work of art doesn’t age, translations age… Ezra Pound said: each generation should re-translate its classics…’

‘Slang gets outdated quickly. Translators try to use a form of slang that existed in the 50’s and is still here… The reader is led to believe that the book was written today, but it was written in the mid-19th century…’

‘Translators have a little more power these days…’

Here is the link. http://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/em/eclectik_dim/index.php

You can listen again for up to 45 days.

Here is another deeply insightful interview in a news magazine: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/2008/09/18/cest-mark-twain-quil-ressuscite

Bernard Hoepffner’s own website is here: http://wvorg.free.fr/hoepffner/ with an impressive list of his translations.

With this new translation, the aim is to restore the full power of the books, which have been restricted to the children’s books market. Unfortunately as Bernard Hoepffner states in his printed interview, Mark Twain is so famous here in France that few people bother to read him now. I had to read Huckleberry Finn’s Adventures in English for my degree many years ago, but I never read any translation. I caught a few glimpses of the children’s TV program that was made of it, when my kids were small. That is probably the only version of the book that many people will have had contact with.
I’m definitely getting these new translations. Actually I’ve just ordered them online.
As for now, after an hour of intense daydreaming, I’m back to my technical translations… different styles, different purposes, different uses, but I’m thankful for people like literary translators.