French English Translation: Common Grammar v. Divergent Habits

                                                                                         

English and French have a lot in common, which should make French English translation that much simpler. Both are subject-prominent languages with relatively fixed SVO (subject-verb-object) word order. And yet literary habits, which also play a significant role in translating between the two, are, in some areas, vastly different.

Both English and French are Indo-European languages: English from the Germanic branch, French from the Italic. All Germanic languages, with the exception of English, are V2 languages (meaning the verb is always in the second position in the sentence) and all Italic languages, with the exception of French, are null subject languages (meaning the sentence does not require a subject, usually because the conjugation of the verb implies the subject). By different pathways on the Indo-European tree, both French and English came to be SVO languages, losing much of the grammatical inflection of their predecessors and maintaining fixed, subject-prominent word order. Interestingly, both French and English maintain versions of VSO and SOV:

VSO Questions:
French: Connais-tu l'arabe? (Do you know Arabic?) - literally: know you Arabic?
English poetics, Shakespeare: Met I my father? (King Lear)

SOV With all pronoun objects:
French: Elle vous aime. (She loves you.) - literally: She you loves
English fossilized expressions: 'Til Death do us part.

Despite these syntactic similarities, the literary habits of the two languages have numerous dissimilarities, and here is where French English translation becomes more complicated. A major hurdle for translators is how to deal with French's ubiquitous phrase stacking. French writers love to stack appositives and/or subsequent actions, separating them only by commas, and creating sentences that are exceedingly long by English standards (ever fearful of run-on sentences), and which translate awkwardly. Good French English translators must be willing to break apart the stacks in order to create manageable bites for English readers. This can be done several different ways: by breaking the sentence into two (with either a period or a conjunction: and, but...) or by using an alternative way to show a relationship between the clauses (with a demonstrative determiner, that or which, or a dash). Unfortunately, this always forces the translation to lose some of the tempo of the original. Another issue in French English translation is the distance between a noun phrase and its modifier. Largely as a result of French morphosyntax, including noun gender and verb conjugation, French readers can easily determine the antecedent of a modifying clause. English, however, has neither of these linguistic phenomena and traditional prescriptive grammar requires that modifying clauses be contiguous to the noun phrase that they modify. In the end, translators must rearrange sentences and perform various linguistic gymnastics in order to remove this distance and keep the translation sounding natural in English.

There is a common misconception that because French and English are closely related languages, French English translation is relatively simple. And while it is true that the two languages share much in the way of basic grammar, there are hundreds of years of literary tradition between them.

About the author:
About the Author:
Armando Riquier is a freelance author and translator, part of the Tectrad's quality control team. Tectrad is a professional translation company offering since 1990 a wide range of services in the field, particularly French English translations

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