History records that the land once known as Gaul was (eventually!) entirely occupied by the Romans. But not even the Romans could remove all traces of the Celtic language that used to be spoken there. A surprising number of places in modern France take their name from one given by the ancient Gauls. And some of these places even preserve the name of the Celtic tribe that used to live there.
Modern French owes little to the language spoken by the Celtic tribes that once lived in the areas called Gallia Celtica and Belgica by the ancient Romans (roughly most of modern-day France, Belgium, and Switzerland). The historian and linguist, Mireille Huchon, says that standard modern French contains only around 150 words that come from this language, called Gaulish. While linguist Xavier Delamarre, one of the foremost experts on the Gaulish language, puts the number at closer to 300 if we count little-used dialectical words from different regions in French.
However, one area where Gaulish has left its mark is in French toponyms, or place names. Hundreds of villages, towns, cities, and even regions in France actually take their name from one given to it by a Gallic tribe. Sometimes these names originally held information about a settlement’s location, like Chambord, from camboritu, the ford at the river bend. Or the numerous towns now called Brive, Brives, or Brèves which indicated the presence of a briva, or bridge. Others indicate the worship of a god at a certain location. The cities of Laon and Lyon, for example, take their name from sites associated with the Celtic god Lug. While Nîmes and Nemours derive their name from the Gaulish word nemeton, a temple or sacred site.
A map of Gallia Celtica and Belgica around the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion in 58 BC.
More frequently, these modern place names are derived from Gaulish compound names formed of two different elements. For example, the widely used suffix -dunon (hill, fortress), can be found in the original names of towns like Medun (Meclodunon) and Verdun (Verodunon). The suffix -magos (field, market) can be found in the names of Rouen (from Rotomagos), Caen (Catumagos), and Nyons (Noviomagos). While the prefix Novio- (new) also lies at the root of names like Nevers and Noyon (both from Noviodunon).
When Gallia Celtica and Belgica officially became part of the Roman Empire at the end of the 1st century BC, the new provinces were organized around civitates. These were essentially regional market towns, that included the name of the original Gallic tribe that lived there. Interestingly, this tribal name later often came to replace the name of an original Gaulish settlement. It was also sometimes even extended to include the region in which the town was found. Probably the best known example of this is the city of Paris, which was originally called Lutetia by the Gauls. But by the 3rd century AD, the town was known as Lutetia apud Parisios, or Lutetia of the Parisii,the tribe whose settlement it once was.
Below is a list of the main Gallic tribes attested in ancient Roman sources that have given their name to a modern French settlement or region. Most of these tribal names come from Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion of Gaul, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (mid 1st c. BC). But others are mentioned, sometimes in a slightly different form, in Polybius (mid 2nd c. BC), Cicero (mid 1st c. BC), Livy, (late 1st c. BC), Pliny (mid 1st c. AD), and Ptolemy (2nd c. AD).
In 1537, Jeanne d’Albret de Navarre, aged eight, fell ill and had to stay in bed, possibly in some form of quarantine. We know this because one of the most celebrated poets of the French Renaissance, Clément Marot, wrote her a get well soon note in verse. It’s a short poem, and at first glance even a rather simple one. But its compact size also makes it a definite challenge to translate. And nearly 500 years later, it still has the power to resonate with our experience of the modern world.
Marot first joined the court of Jeanne’s mother, Marguerite of Navarre, sometime around 1519. He was there until 1527, when he became a valet de chambre to Marguerite’s brother, the King of France, François I. But Marot remained in close contact with Marguerite and her family until he was forced into exile near the end of his life in 1542. When young Jeanne fell ill, it seems only natural that the poet wanted to wish her well. It’s also probable that doing so wouldn’t have hurt his prospects for future employment.
Despite containing a few archaisms, the poem that Marot wrote to poor Jeanne is surprisingly clear to readers of modern French. It’s made up of 14 rhyming couplets, whose lines are just three syllables long. This helps make the poem feel a bit like a nursery rhyme, perhaps fitting given its intended recipient. The first line of the poem is also repeated as the last line, ensuring that the opening and closing couplets share the same rhyme. Here it is in Marot’s French:
Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour ; Le sejour C’est prison. Guerison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Vostre porte Et qu’on sorte Vistement, Car Clement Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures ; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras, Et perdras L’embonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne.
What initially reads like a simple poem written hastily for a child turns out to have some fairly tight formal constraints. Ignoring the first and last lines, all of the poem’s units of sense are also out of step with the rhyming couplets. This means that each unit of sense spans two different rhyming couplets. These semantic units are almost all separated in the poem by punctuation marks, but on one occasion they are separated by a conjunction.
Curiously, in the first half of the poem, Marot addresses Jeanne using the formal personal pronoun, vous, while in the second half he switches to the informal pronoun, tu. Why he did this, we don’t know. As a princess, Jeanne was easily Marot’s social ‘superior’ and could normally expect to be addressed using the formal vous. But he was clearly on friendly terms with a girl who was much younger than himself, which would have made the use of the informal tu more likely. Aside from being a neat formal trick, changing pronouns might simply have made certain lines easier to write. In many cases, using the formal vous in French adds an extra syllable to the verb being conjugated.
Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot
I first became aware of Marot’s poem a few years ago, when I chanced upon a copy of Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter. At its heart, the book is a wide-ranging inquiry into the nature of language and the art of translation. In it, Hofstadter asks some big questions: about the mental processes involved in language creation, whether translation can truly be a successful process, about when a translation becomes a new work in its own right, and whether machine learning can ever use language as well as a human being. He mixes this with autobiography, analysis, and plenty of wordplay. Published in 1997, much of the book now feels remarkably prescient in an age of Google Translate and ChatGPT.
Running through the book like a unifying thread is Marot’s poem, which Hofstadter uses to illustrate some of the many linguistic and translation problems he discusses. To do this, he presents the original poem in French along with 88 different translations into English. Many of these were made by himself. But others were made by colleagues, students, poets, professional translators, and even machine translation programs like Systran and Candide, the immediate predecessors of Google Translate. As might be expected, the results are wildly diverse. But Hofstadter also challenges readers of the book to produce their own translation of the poem to experience firsthand the things he is talking about. Naturally, it was a challenge I accepted.
I was firstly keen to preserve as many of the poem’s formal elements as possible, starting with the rhyming couplets and their short three syllable length. While stress is less of a feature in French poetry than it is in English, the main stress in every line of the original could be said to fall on the third syllable. Most of the lines also have some degree of secondary stress on the first syllable. To try and emulate this in English, the stress pattern for those three syllables really has to be stressed-unstressed-stressed, often notated in systems of scansion as / x /.
Something that a lot of the translations in Hofstadter’s book don’t address is the historical nature of the poem in French, written nearly 500 years ago. Many of them actually try to modernize the poem’s language, inadvertently transposing the setting to some sort of near past as a result. And, at least according to Hofstadter, that’s a valid strategy for translating the poem. However, I wanted to try and preserve something of the effect that Marot’s poem has on a modern French reader. To do this requires translating it into an English that at least might have been spoken in the 16th century.
I took as my model the English of William Shakespeare. While he wrote slightly later than Marot, there are plenty of resources available that document the language he used. One of the best is the Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by the German philologist, Alexander Schmidt, first published in 1875. This is a mine of information, that gives definitions of words as used by Shakespeare, examples of usage, and references to where in his work specific words are used. There is a free version available online, but I have a two-volume edition published by Dover.
Using a version of English that is historical would certainly let me address the problem posed by Marot’s use of both the vous and tu pronouns. In modern English, both of these would be translated by the pronoun ‘you’. But English in Shakespeare’s time still preserved this difference with two pronouns, the formal ‘you’ and informal ‘thou’. It would also obviously make it easier to try and reproduce some of the slightly archaic language present in Marot’s poem.
At last, a book that does what it says on the cover!
After spending a good deal more time than I initially expected, here is the translation I settled on along with Marot’s original:
A une Damoyselle malade
Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour ; Le sejour C’est prison. Guerison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Vostre porte, Et qu’on sorte Vistement, Car Clement Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures ; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras, Et perdras L’embonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne.
To a Sick Damsel
My fair sweet, I do greet You this day; Forced to stay In this gaol, Cease to ail And be sound, Then do bound To your door, Quickly for To skip free, Clement, he Asks you this. Thou whose bliss Is to taste, Yet who waste Sick abed, Come be fed On quince pie; If thou lie Too long ill Fade thou will Unto white And from right Plump will pine. God make thine Health complete, My fair sweet.
Some parts of the poem clearly present more of a challenge to translate than others. Because the first and last couplets share the same rhyme, for example, that rhyme needs to work for three different lines rather than two. I solved this problem in the second to last line with the adjective ‘complete’, which in Shakespeare’s time could still mean ‘perfect’.
There’s a certain degree of repetition contained in Lines 6 and 7 of the poem:
Guerison Recouvrez,
The idea here is that Jeanne should recover her good health. I’ve tried to mimic this by using both a negative equivalent and a positive adjective:
Cease to ail And be sound,
One of several meanings that the adjective ‘sound’ had in the 16th century was ‘healthy’. This is the meaning preserved in the modern English saying ‘safe and sound’.
The only place in my translation where the semantic content of the original is reversed comes in Lines 10 and 11:
Et qu’on sorte Vistement,
becoming:
Quickly for To skip free,
I’ve done this firstly because to my ear it sounds more natural in English, even if it means that the adverb now refers to the verb ‘bound’ in line 8. It also lets me use the ‘for to’ construction followed by an infinitive, used reasonably often by Shakespeare with a meaning of ‘in order to’.
I think my biggest departure from the original comes in Line 19, where Marot urges Jeanne to eat confitures. Here I couldn’t make any direct equivalent work. The typical modern translation, ‘jam’ only came into English in the 18thcentury. ‘Marmalade’ was known in Shakespeare’s time, but I couldn’t find an appropriate rhyme to complete the couplet. Its pronunciation would also have to be wrenched to stress the final syllable. I reasoned that Marot was probably more interested in a word that would rhyme with the next line than with what type of comfort food Jeanne should be eating. I take as my authority for ‘quince pie’ a short line in Romeo and Juliet:
NURSE. They call for dates and quinces in the pastry.
The ‘pastry’ here being the room in which pies and pastries were made rather than the dish itself.
With an almost total absence of metaphor or figurative language, the real difficulty in translating Marot’s poem lies in its formal characteristics. The poem’s very short rhyming couplets, for example, leave little room for manoeuvre. As a result, there’s almost nowhere that you can avoid translating all of the sense in one line, knowing that you can express it elsewhere. And because the semantic content of the poem is out of step with the rhyming couplets, you feel strangely like you’re always taking two steps forward and one step back. Possibly my only regret was not being able to reproduce Marot’s use of just one word for three of the poem’s lines. This was a touch of poetic bravado that multi-syllable words in English seemed unwilling to follow.
I’m a compulsive buyer of books. So when I first came across Hofstadter’s book, I bought it and simply put it on one of several piles to be read at some time in the future. It wasn’t until the world was in the midst of a pandemic and successive lockdowns that I finally picked it up to read it. I was already a good way through when it occurred to me that, in the poem’s short telegram-style lines addressed to someone who was ill, possibly in quarantine, Marot might easily be texting a friend who was self-isolating with COVID; just checking in, wishing them all the best, hoping to see them again soon. Sometimes we’re not so removed from the past as we think.
« All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to people they know, like, and trust » Bob Berg.
Dans les pays occidentaux, même avant la crise sanitaire actuelle, il y avait déjà une crise de confiance généralisée : une perte de confiance dans les institutions politiques, surtout, mais aussi une perte de confiance dans les médias et les grandes entreprises dont les campagnes de marketing correspondent rarement à leurs actes. Dans le sillage de la Covid-19, gagner la confiance de clients potentiels devient primordial pour toute organisation. Nous vivons désormais dans un monde incertain où des secteurs entiers sont bouleversés. Pour vos visiteurs, il ne s’agit pas seulement d’avoir confiance dans les mesures de protection que vous avez mises en place, mais surtout d’avoir la confiance, voire la certitude, que votre produit, votre service, ou l’expérience de visite correspond bien, sinon parfaitement, à leurs besoins.
Dans de telles circonstances, comment établir des relations de confiance avec des visiteurs (physiques ou virtuels) quand ceux-ci parlent une autre langue que le français ? Evidemment, cela implique un ensemble d’éléments, y compris l’UX de votre site (web et/ou physique), la façon dont vous communiquez avec vos visiteurs, et bien sûr votre service après-vente. Quel est le dénominateur commun de tous ces éléments ? Ils sont presque tous véhiculés par le langage. Il est donc impératif que vous parlez la même langue que vos clients étrangers.
Parler le même langage, certes, mais pas de n’importe quelle manière. On est tous tenus actuellement à être plus rigoureux dans nos habitudes et dans l’exercice de notre profession. Si vous n’êtes pas capable de communiquer dans la langue de vos visiteurs sans faire des fautes de grammaires et des fautes d’orthographe, vous soulevez des doutes sur votre capacité à répondre parfaitement à leurs besoins. En effet, manquer de rigueur dans vos communications signalera pour le client potentiel que vous manquez probablement de rigueur ailleurs.
Mais faire confiance est une décision autant émotionnelle que logique. Le biais pro-endogroupe est un concept de psychologie sociale qui démontre que nous avons tous tendance à évaluer plus positivement, favoriser et faire plus confiance à des gens qu’on perçoit comme faisant partie de notre « groupe » (culturel, national, ethnique, ou d’une même catégorie sociale). Cela revient à dire que si vous voulez gagner la confiance de vos visiteurs étrangers et optimiser leur engagement, il faut impérativement utiliser le même langage qu’eux, y compris le même vocabulaire, les mêmes tournures de phrase, les mêmes métaphores…
Ce concept constitue le fondement du processus de localisation linguistique : la traduction et l’adaptation d’un produit ou d’un service en tenant compte des spécificités d’un pays ou groupe étranger. Et si vous pensez que les petites erreurs font un effet « French touch » dans vos communications étrangères, détrompez-vous ! Vous risquez surtout d’associer tous les préjuges négatifs sur les français à votre organisation.
Dans l’après Covid-19, un traducteur qui travaille vers sa langue maternelle n’est pas simplement quelqu’un que vous rémunérez pour convertir vos mots dans une autre langue. Il devient alors un partenaire essentiel à votre organisation qui détient les clés pour vous ouvrir la porte vers une autre culture. Car seuls ceux qui écrivent dans leur langue maternelle peuvent comprendre un concept en français et maîtriser les subtilités nécessaires pour ensuite le communiquer d’une manière qui permet degagner la confiance de vos visiteurs étrangers et donc d’optimiser leur engagement.
On a tous vu ces articles qui apparaissent de temps en temps sur les réseaux sociaux et dans la presse sur ces mots dits intraduisibles. Si on peut en effet admettre que les mots en question n’ont peut-être pas un équivalent unique dans une autre langue, il me semble que les auteurs de tels articles, ainsi que les nombreux gens qui les partagent sur les réseaux sociaux, ignorent deux principes de la traduction pourtant essentiels :
1) Tout d’abord, les langues ont toutes des constructions grammaticales différentes. De ce fait, on peut rarement se contenter de traduire un mot en l’isolant d’une phrase. Si c’était le cas, les traducteurs produiraient tous des traductions mot à mot et très littérales à la façon Google Translate et Cie. Quelle horreur !
Voici quelques exemples pour illustrer ce principe :
Un nom abstrait en français est souvent traduit par une série de mots concrets en anglais :
Français Les débuts du cinéma On a dû jouer les prolongations Le clergé avait la haute main sur les âmes
Anglais The early days of cinema Extra time had to be played The clergy had complete authority over spiritual matters
Par ailleurs, beaucoup des locutions verbales en français sont traduits par des verbes simples en anglais :
Français Fermer à clef Je buvais mon café à petit coups Il leur a dit tout bas de se taire
Anglais To lock I was sipping my coffee He whispered to them to be quiet
De même, beaucoup de locutions adjectivales et adverbiales en français sont traduits par un simple adverbe en anglais :
Français D’un air de reproche À plusieurs reprises D’un œil critique
Anglais Reproachfully Repeatedly Critically
2) Ensuite, tout dépend du contexte. En effet, les mots ne sont que les symboles que nous utilisons pour produire du sens. Et ce qu’un traducteur doit dégager d’un texte c’est surtout son sens. La traduction consiste donc non pas à reproduire simplement des mots dans une autre langue mais à formuler les idées, les concepts et les sentiments décrits par ces mots. Et le fait que certains mots n’aient pas d’équivalent unique dans une autre langue ne les rend pas intraduisibles car nous pouvons à coup sûr traduire le concept ou l’idée qu’ils représentent.
C’est pour cela que les traducteurs professionnels travaillent uniquement vers leur langue maternelle. Car seuls les gens qui écrivent dans leur langue maternelle peuvent comprendre un concept dans une langue étrangère et maîtriser les subtilités nécessaires pour ensuite communiquer ce concept, sans fautes, dans leur langue.
Notre rôle de traducteur est donc de traduire du sens. En conséquence, le fait d’avoir une bonne connaissance de la langue ne suffit pas. Il faut aussi avoir une bonne compréhension des idées exprimées dans un texte, ce qui exige normalement une certaine familiarité avec la matière en question. De ce fait, un traducteur spécialisé dans la domaine juridique n’est peut-être pas la meilleure personne pour traduire des fiches médicales ou votre dernière campagne de marketing. D’où le constat que les diplômes de traduction ne garantissent en rien une bonne traduction de votre texte. Et les meilleurs traducteurs sont souvent, soit connaisseurs expérimentés, soit amateurs passionnés, des domaines dans lesquels ils travaillent.
En anglais comme en français, la plupart des noms s’emploient au singulier et au pluriel. Il s’agit des noms dénombrables, qu’on peut directement compter.
Exemple : one apple, two apples.
Plus rares sont les noms indénombrables, qu’on ne peut pas compter et qui n’ont qu’une seule forme. Ils existent soit au singulier, soit au pluriel.
Exemple : money, air, clothes.
Jusqu’ici tout va bien. Mais là où ça se complique c’est qu’il n’y a pas de correspondance absolue entre ces noms dans les deux langues. Autrement dit, il y a des noms dénombrables en français qui se traduisent par des noms indénombrables en anglais. Aussi, certains noms indénombrables sont pluriels en français mais singuliers en anglais et vice-versa. Il faut donc une bonne connaissance de ces règles si vous ne voulez pas faire des erreurs de traduction abominables.
Justement, on trouve très fréquemment ce type d’erreur dans le secteur du tourisme. De nombreux sites internets de lieux touristiques en France ont, à l’intention des visiteurs anglophones, un rubrique « informations », qui est calqué sur « renseignements » en français (on voit aussi le cas de « informations pratiques » traduit par « practical informations »).
En fait, la forme plurielle en français se traduit en anglais par le singulier « information ». Ce petit « s » de trop suffit pour signaler au monde entier que votre site a été mal traduit et que vous ne parlez pas si bien la langue de vos clients anglophones.
D’autres exemples fréquemment mal traduits dans le secteur du tourisme :
Français Des bagages Des hébergements Les transports Des voyages Des conseils
Traduction correcte en anglais Luggage Accommodation Transport / Transportation Travel (ou selon le contexte « Trips ») Advice
De plus, les noms indénombrables en anglais peuvent être précédés par des mots déterminants (e.x. « some », « my », « her ») mais ils ne doivent jamais être précédés d’un nombre ou d’un article indéfini , comme par exemple « a » ou « an ».
Exemple : Some information / accommodation / advice
Pour certains d’entre eux on peut exprimer une quantité par une unité de mesure avant le nom, dont la forme générique est « a piece of ».
Exemple : A piece of information / luggage / advice
Mais là encore, faîtes attention, car certains noms indénombrables sont aussi associés à des unités particulières :
Exemples : A lot of travel A suit of armour A loaf of bread A bowl of fruit A flash of lightning
Rappelez-vous bien ces règles car la mauvaise association peut nuire à l’image de votre organisation. Ou bien ne prenez pas de risques et faîtes traduire votre site par un traducteur de langue maternelle anglaise.
Il est nécessaire, si vous prenez votre communication à l’internationale au sérieux, de penser à la traduction plus tôt dans votre processus de création de contenu. Et si jusqu’ici la traduction ne faisait pas partie de votre processus de création de contenu, elle devrait l’être dès maintenant.
La traduction est trop souvent une arrière-pensée pour certaines organisations. Un scénario familier à tout traducteur est celui ou le client a besoin d’une traduction dans quelques jours, voire le lendemain matin alors que le contenu original a été validé des semaines, parfois même des mois auparavant.
Dans des tels cas, la capacité d’un traducteur, à non seulement traiter votre demande à temps mais aussi à poser des questions si besoin pour comprendre pleinement le texte, est fortement limité. Fréquemment, cela ne laisse pas non plus le temps pour faire des changements dans la traduction si besoin.
Alors à quel moment faut-il commencer à penser à la traduction ? Il faut évidemment attendre que vous ayez validé la version finale de votre contenu avant de vous lancer dans la traduction. Mais pourtant, dès le début du processus de création de contenu, vous pouvez prendre ces quelques mesures qui vont faciliter une traduction éventuelle :
Au moment de définir le contenu que vous allez créer, vous pouvez déjà réfléchir si vous aurez éventuellement besoin d’une traduction et si oui, se renseigner sur les disponibilités de votre traducteur pour la faire dans le délai requis.
Si vous avez déjà une idée approximative du nombre de mots et du format de votre contenu, vous pouvez dès à présent demander un devis pour sa traduction, avant même que le contenu original soit validé.
Vérifiez que la terminologie que vous utilisez pour décrire vos produits ou vos services est cohérente. Si ce n’est pas le cas, votre traducteur aura certainement besoin de clarification de votre part, ce qui nécessitera plus de temps.
S’il s’agit d’un nom de produit ou d’une accroche publicitaire destinée pour un marché international, il est conseillé d’impliquer votre traducteur dès le début du processus – surtout si vous ne voulez pas de mauvaises surprises. Pour cette même raison, pensez à utiliser un traducteur qui traduit vers sa langue maternelle.
En conclusion, si vous attendez la dernière minute pour faire réaliser votre traduction, vous augmentez le risque d’avoir une traduction faite à la va-vite et qui ne répond pas a vos attentes. Et pourquoi prendre ce risque quand on voit comment les erreurs de traduction peuvent avoir des conséquences sur votre réputation à l’internationale ?
Une des révélations les plus intéressantes de la psycholinguistique est que la langue qu’on parle nous fait voir le monde d’une certaine manière. Ce qui veut dire qu’on ne voit pas tous la même réalité. Cela a, évidemment, des implications dans la traduction, surtout si on veut éviter que notre traduction soit trop littérale.
En parlant des différences entre le français et l’anglais, Le philosophe et historien français, Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), disait :
« Traduire en français une phrase anglaise, c’est copier au crayon gris une figure en couleur. Réduisant ainsi les aspects et les qualités des choses, l’esprit français aboutit à des idées générales, c’est-à-dire simples, qu’il aligne dans un ordre simplifié, celui de la logique. »
On peut dire que l’inverse est aussi vrai. Pour traduire en anglais une phrase française, il faut ajouter de la couleur.
En effet, d’une façon générale, les mots français sont plus abstraits que leurs équivalents en anglais. Autrement dit, le français a une préférence pour ce qu’on appel en linguistique des mots signes, ou des termes généraux. L’anglais, par contre, préfère des mots images, qui sont (comme leur nom l’indique) plus imagés et plus descriptifs par rapport à la réalité concrète.
En plus, souvent le mot signe français sert comme dénominateur commun a des séries de mots images synonymes en anglais. Un point qu’on peut facilement illustrer avec quelques exemples tirés de l’excellent ouvrage de Jean-Paul Vinay et Jean Darbelnet, Sylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais :
1) Le mot français « coup », peut être utilisé pour décrire un tas de phénomènes très différents. Mais pour le traduire en anglais, on est obligé de choisir parmi toute une gamme d’équivalents selon la situation spécifique : « blow », « cut », « stroke », « shot », « kick », « clap », « gust », « crack »…
2) Dans les perceptions auditives et visuelles, pour traduire « grincement » en anglais on peut, selon la situation, choisir entre « grating », « squeeking », « creaking », « grinding », ou même « gnashing ». Et pour traduire le verbe « luire », c’est difficile de ne pas avoir une certaine admiration pour les choix allitératifs de l’anglais, entre « to glimmer », « to gleam », « to glow » « to glisten », ou « to glint ».
Bien sûr, cela ne veut pas dire que le français est toujours plus abstrait que l’anglais. Il arrive, bien que rarement, que le français soit plus descriptif. Par exemple, l’anglais doit se contenter de « bell » là où le français offre un choix entre « cloche », « clochette », « sonnette », « grelot », et « timbre ». Dans ce cas, pour pouvoir distinguer entre ces choix, l’anglais doit utiliser des adjectifs en plus.
Les sigles et les acronymes nous facilitent la communication depuis l’antiquité. Ils nous évitent de prononcer ou d’écrire toute une série des mots lorsqu’on veut faire référence à un concept particulier, à un nom d’organisation ou même à une personne. Cependant, cette économie, qui est censé faire passer des idées plus rapidement, devient problématique en matière de traduction. Par exemple, un sigle ou un acronyme français n’est pas nécessairement rendu par un sigle ou un acronyme anglais et inversement.
Selon le Larousse, un sigle est une abréviation formée par une suite de lettres qui sont les initiales d’un groupe de mots. Il est épelé. Un acronyme est un substantif dont l’origine est un sigle, mais qui se prononce comme un mot ordinaire. FMI est un sigle, OTAN est un acronyme. La même distinction existe d’ailleurs en anglais, entre « initialism » (un sigle) et « acronym » (un acronyme). Comment alors procéder à leur traduction ?
1) Au plus simple, il faut chercher un équivalent, s’il existe, dans la langue cible. Cette solution semble obligatoire pour des organisations internationales. Mais un équivalent ne veut pas dire une traduction littérale. Si l’équivalent du sigle OCDE est bien OECD en anglais, l’équivalent anglais du sigle français ONU est simplement UN. Par ailleurs, certains sigles et acronymes s’emploient sous la même forme quelle que soit la langue. Par exemple, UNICEF est utilisé aussi bien en français qu’en anglais, et GPS semble s’imposer comme sigle générique pour les systèmes de positionnement par satellites.
2) Les sigles et acronymes de signification purement national sont plus complexes. Car fréquemment il s’agit d’une organisation ou d’un concept qui n’a pas d’équivalent exact dans une autre culture et donc dans une autre langue. Je pense, par exemple, à la CAF ou au système de classification des vins AOC/AOP, qui n’ont pas de vrais équivalents dans les pays anglophones. Dans ces cas, la traduction littérale du sigle ou de l’acronyme n’aura pas de signification pour un public étranger. La stratégie qui semble être la plus courante est de garder le sigle ou l’acronyme tel qu’il est, et de donner une traduction ou même une explication du nom ou du concept la première fois qu’il apparaît dans le texte.
3) Qu’en est-il des sigles qui indiquent le nom de personnes ? Un article de presse français qui citerait BHL, DSK, VGE, NKM ou PPDA resterait parfaitement incompréhensible pour un public anglophone ayant une connaissance limitée de la culture française. D’autant plus qu’en anglais on a beaucoup moins l’habitude d’utiliser des sigles pour designer le nom de personnes. Il en demeure néanmoins quelques rares exceptions (presque toutes américaines d’ailleurs) tel JFK ou AOC (et non, il ne s’agit pas de vin cette fois-ci !).
Il y avait récemment un beau poste à pourvoir pour un(e) traducteur(trice)-rédacteur(trice) dans le service de communication de la Présidence de la République. En plus d’un profil BAC + 2, le savoir-faire majeur requis pour ce poste, chargé d’assurer des traductions de français vers l’anglais et de l’anglais vers le français, était « anglais bilingue ». Ce qui mérite quelques commentaires.
Je laisse de côté la définition du mot « bilingue », terme nettement plus complexe qu’un CV ou les profils sur une réseau comme LinkedIn peuvent suggérer. Ce que je trouve plus grave dans ce descriptif de poste est l’implication qu’il suffit d’être bilingue pour être traducteur, et aussi qu’une même personne peut évidemment faire la traduction entre ces deux langues dans les deux sens.
Bien entendu, pour être traducteur professionnel il faut avoir tout au moins des solides compétences dans une deuxième langue. Mais un traducteur est avant tout un écrivain. Il faut savoir écrire de façon impeccable dans la langue vers laquelle on traduit, et c’est la raison pour laquelle tout traducteur professionnel traduit uniquement vers sa langue maternelle. Car seuls les gens qui écrivent dans leur langue maternelle peuvent comprendre un concept ou un message dans une autre langue et maîtriser les subtilités nécessaires pour ensuite le communiquer sans fautes dans leur propre langue.
Il est à regretter que lors de l’élaboration de ce poste, le service de communication de la Présidence de la République n’avait pas consulté au préalable la Société Française des Traducteurs (SFT), que je cite :
« Si vous voulez donner une image internationale, l’approximation est interdite. Sachez que dans de nombreuses cultures, les gens n’apprécient guère que l’on déforme leur langue. Faites appel à un traducteur dont la langue maternelle correspond à la langue d’arrivée désirée. Il en maîtrise les subtilités culturelles et linguistiques et ne faillira pas aux règles typographiques. L’accumulation de coquilles devient vite un repoussoir pour un lecteur étranger ! »
On comprend alors mieux comment François Hollande ait pu terminer une lettre à Obama avec « Friendly ». C’est aussi le même président américain qui a vu son prénom écorché (« Barak ») dans une missive de Nicolas Sarkozy pour fêter son élection. N’oubliez jamais que la qualité de communication reflète l’image de votre marque. Accepteriez-vous de telles fautes dans vos communications en français ?
It can be something of a lonely life working as a French to English translator in a small provincial town in the north of New Zealand. Most of my contact with the translation community and clients comes via the internet. And although cities like Auckland and Wellington have seen a significant increase in the numbers of French people living there in recent years, the French community in Northland still borders on tiny. Opportunities to speak French outside of my own bilingual home environment are few and far between.
So it was something of a surprise to learn recently that Whangārei (population currently 57,000) used to be home to one of the world’s leading authorities on the French writer, Alexandre Dumas père (1802-1870), best known for popular historical novels like The Three Musketeers, and The Count of Monte Cristo. Perhaps even more interesting from a New Zealand literary history point of view, is that the authority in question was Frank Reed (1874-1953), the older brother of A H Reed (1875-1975), the well-known writer and founder of the Reed publishing house.
Items from the Reed Dumas collection, including a portrait of Alexandre Dumas. Source: Auckland central city library.
The Reed family were from Hayes, Middlesex in England, now close to Heathrow airport. They emigrated to New Zealand in 1887, eventually settling in Whangarei, where their father, James Reed, found work on the northern Kauri gumfields. After leaving school, both Reed brothers started working with their father digging for Kauri gum before Frank Reed started an apprenticeship with the Whangārei pharmacist in 1888 at the age of 14. It was a profession he would keep until his early retirement in 1926.
Frank Reed’s interest in Alexandre Dumas had started with his novel The Queen’s Necklace, one of twelve precious books that Reed was allowed to take in his baggage for the voyage to New Zealand. He was a voracious reader, and upon settling in Whangārei had soon worked his way through more of Dumas’ novels, Ascanio, Isabel of Bavaria, and The Black Tulip found in the local Whangārei library (a “dimly-lit building” according to Reed, who bemoaned the “shabby bindings of the majority of its volumes”1).
His interest in Dumas had been piqued, but information on Dumas in English in the late 19th century was still scarce. From his isolated location in Whangārei, Reed had to make do with gathering what information he could about the extent of Dumas’ published output (which is monumental, taking in a number of different genres and totalling around 100,000 pages) from publishers’ advertisements in the books he had read. Soon he was forwarding desiderata lists to Auckland-based booksellers, and eventually to book dealers in England.
This correspondence abroad began in the early years of the 20th century after Reed got his hands on a prospectus from London-based publisher Methuen, which had planned a complete translated edition of Dumas’ novels to celebrate the 1902 centenary of his birth. This listed a large number of Dumas’ works that were previously unknown to Reed. It was the start of several invaluable long-distance relationships with London booksellers who would track down rare Dumas items for Reed, and which included both English and French first editions of a number of works. Some of these relationships endured over many years, and went far beyond that of retailer and customer.
Perhaps almost inevitably, this also brought Reed into contact with Robert Singleton Garnett, at the time one of the chief English translators of Dumas, and the recognized English-language authority on his work. Through their letters over a period of 16 years, the two struck up a friendship, and Garnett also sourced a number of rare Dumas items for Reed, including many in manuscript. It was a measure of their friendship that when Garnett died in 1932, he willed his entire Dumas collection of 740 items to Reed, an unexpected windfall that was duly shipped from London to Whangarei.
In 1919, one of the works that Garnett managed to find for Reed was the standard French bibliography of Dumas’ work, Alexandre Dumas et Son Œuvre (1884) by Charles Glinel. Importantly, this new acquisition led Reed to start learning French, giving him access to much more information on Dumas, and then to start translating the work of Dumas in his turn. Over the following 34 years, Reed translated many of Dumas’ works into English, including plays, poetry and lesser-known prose works, some for the first time. In total, his translations run to around 20,000 typescript pages. Much of this translation work was done after Reed had put in a 12-hour day at his pharmacy and around the demands of family life. This would represent a significant accomplishment today with all the benefit of online resources, let alone in the first half of the 20th century, far removed from the literary centres of London and Paris.
Frank Reed
In 1933, with the help of his bookselling contacts in London, Reed also published the result of many years of research, his Bibliography of Alexandre Dumas Père. The first bibliography of Dumas’ work in English that was anywhere near complete, it was received with wide international acclaim. As with his translation work, the fact that Reed was able to put this together having never left New Zealand, and seldom leaving Whangārei, seems little short of remarkable. Reed’s work also proved to have an enduring influence, forming the basis of several later bibliographies published by other authors.
And his efforts didn’t go unnoticed by the French. In 1927, the French government awarded Reed the title of Officier d’Académie in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques for his services to French literature. After the publication of his bibliography, in 1934 Reed was given the further title of Officier de l’Instruction Publique for his services to French language and culture.
Reed arranged for his large Dumas collection to go the Auckland central library (perhaps remembering those shabby bindings in Whangārei!) after his death in 1953, where it is still housed. The Reed Dumas collection forms part of the library’s Sir George Gray Special Collections, and is comprised of 3,350 volumes. This includes 2,000 original holographs by Dumas, 329 Belgian, 166 French, and 370 English first editions of Dumas’ works, 51 typescript volumes of Reed’s translations, letters, portraits and Dumas-related material, and the Robert Singleton Garnett Collection.
Further information about Reed’s life and work (and the main source of information in this post) can be found in article written by Donald Kerr, Frank W. Reed and his Dumas Collection. Kerr completed an M.A. thesis on Reed at Wellington’s Victoria University in 1992, and is now the Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago. The Auckland central library also has information about the Reed Dumas collection.
1 From Frank Reed’s unpublished autobiography, The Trail of an Alexandrian, Vol. 2, p. 240.
Piet Nieuwland is a New Zealand poet currently living in Maungakaramea, Northland. His poetry hasappeared in a wide number of publications, both in New Zealand and internationally, and he is the author of 17 chapbooks and broadsheets. This interview is drawn from an exchange of questions and answers by email between 22 February and 6 March, 2017.
Aaron Robertson (AR): When did you know that poetry was something that you wanted to do?
Piet Nieuwland (PN): I was always very keen on reading and writing and recall a first poem written at primary school about architecture, being intrigued by the design plans for our new house. At high school, J.K. Baxter featured and poets like A.R.D Fairburn, Allen Curnow, Sam Hunt and Hone Tuwhare were popular. I read all of them, and got right into Vincent O’Sullivan’s Anthology of New Zealand Poetry as well as playing around with writing myself.
Piet Nieuwland
Once I’d completed university and started working in Kaikohe, I had the freedom to read more widely, novels, history, and poetry. A bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s poems and a film about Dylan Thomas with his intense live readings really got me going. There was a small theatre in Kaikohe that held jazz and poetry evenings and where I first read my poems live – a real adrenaline buzz.
AR: Were both your parents from the Netherlands? Did you speak Dutch at home? Was that linguistic environment in any way an influence on your poetry?
PN: My father is from the Netherlands and my mother is from Taranaki. Dad spoke Dutch, mostly on the phone to his friends. We went to Dutch club cultural events and had visits from Grandmother Oma, and Uncle Albert who spoke Dutch and English. Auntie Sjoukje gave me my first Maori/English dictionary. I learnt French at school for a year, German for three years and have attended Spanish classes. Dad studied Japanese at Waikato University and became a fluent speaker. So I experienced other languages from an early age. A year travelling in Asia and Europe as a young man reinforced my understanding there are many other ways of saying things and many other ways of seeing.
The mermaids at Lang’s Beach Slip and dive into the high tide Speaking Swedish in pink multicultual Maori Singing black Californian, polka dot Dutch Laughing French coffee accents and hints of Chinese Spice Scarlet English blondes and Indian ebony golds In a breeze as warm as Bream Bay waves Through tangled pohutukawa shade The summer altar of beach ritual and display Inclines in to shelly sand recline Scent of salt, soft sweet spot of sun on the back Sunglass peering sunscreen spreading all over The islands just over the horizon Curves curve away just enough to Sea foam hiss and turquazure blues
– Coves, Piet Nieuwland
AR: Imagery of New Zealand’s natural world is a central element of your poetry, and you spent a good number of years working for the Department of Conservation. Was your time spent at DOC an influence on your poetry, or the other way round?
PN: My work at the Department of Conservation involved gathering large amounts of usually scientific information on land the Department administered. To this were added contributions from iwi and submissions from a wide range of community organisations. I then distilled and synthesised all this into management strategies, plans and policies. So the language that occupied my days was of the natural world and human relationships with it. The processes of writing strategies and poetry are not that dissimilar.
AR: I would characterize much of your poetry as being sonically dense. You certainly seem to take pleasure purely in the sound of particular combinations of words. Do these sonic elements tend to dictate the direction a poem takes, or does something else generally serve as a starting point?
PN: The starting point, or intention of my poetry is frequently the sense of a place, or a relationship to a place with a person, often someone I’m very close to. The poem develops in steps, piece by piece, and the sound arrives instinctually I think. I listened to a lot of classical piano music from an early age as my parents played duets together. The music occupies me. Having said that, the sound of the poem as you read it on the page is often quite different to the sound as heard in live performance.
The harbour Whangapae // waiting for the inside of paua // the fertile organ, shallow feeding grounds of tamure porae moki and flounder, sifting and stalking through the epidermal fringe of mangrove, the border of luxuriant detritus grey popping and bubbling with the crawl and waddle of crustaceans and molluscs, all warm, the trophic mattress stretches and breathes, the heat opening mitotic pathways, continuums of spirals and networks vibrating.
– from Down the Glide, Piet Nieuwland
AR: Your live delivery of your poems has a hypnotic, incantatory quality. How important do you think it is for poetry to move off the page and be delivered orally? Do you have any conscious models for poetic performance?
PN: Yes I love to read poetry live. It adds dimensions that cannot be conveyed on the page no matter how cleverly it is arranged or laid out. The rhythm, emphasis and accent adopted in live performance all contribute to the overall sensation and energy of the poem. I write for poems to be read aloud. I don’t improvise, as some performance poets do, preferring to keep pretty much to the script, with a group of related poems, followed or preceded by something quite different.
AR: Can you tell me the story behind your immortalization in the covered walkway between Whangarei’s Forum North carpark and Bank St? How did you get chosen to face off against Hone Tuwhare?
PN: A friend of mine at work gave me a newspaper article requesting submissions of poetry for a mural. I sent some in and my ‘Life in the Chromium Archipelago’ was chosen, along with the poem ‘Rain’ by Hone Tuwhare. I don’t know what the process was any more than that. It felt like an honour, an acknowledgment and recognition of several decades of writing and performing to be chosen. The artist did say that he enjoyed the contrasting styles, the direct simplicity of Tuwhare compared with the complexity and enthusiastic life of Nieuwland!
Beyond the loggia Flotillas of entangled eigenvectors Cross the high cumulo-nimbus plateau Over horizons of tecomanthe and roses Clematis and scrambling hoya Tapestries of folded chlorophylls Distant trains call to the marketplace overflowing Evening falls in your hair The gleaming cumuli restless The fiafia night sky is a black moon yellow star Nourished with honey, apricots and almonds Radiata raging in the hollow sou’wester Where we belonged to death Yet our blood was alive With the laughter of the wind
– Beyond the Loggia, Piet Nieuwland
AR: For the last 3 years you’ve co-edited Fast Fibres with Martin Porter, an annual collection of poetry from Northland, or of poets with links to Northland. Are there some identifiable characteristics of poetry from Northland, or of the poets themselves?
PN: Northland poets do like to write about their environment, but they do also reflect their cultures and countries of origin. There is a wide diversity of styles. Poets who no longer live here seem happy to draw upon their connections and experiences of Northland and the images it generates for them. This is also probably true for poets of any region including the university cities who seem to dominate the poetry publishing scene. I hesitate to make any further generalisations about characteristics of Northland poetry or the poets other than to say Northland has a high proportion of very good poets.
AR: Who are some of the poets that you enjoy reading, and why?
PN: I enjoy poetry translated into English especially that originating in Spanish and Portugese. Some favourites are Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Caesar Vallejo, Vincente Huidobro and Garcia Lorca. Those are the well-known ones. Why?, well because there is a mythology that comes alive in these poets and the poetry, one that draws upon a wide net of human experience and expression. The richness of the language and imagery is captivating and inspiring. Ezra Pound I also enjoy very much, like his Cantos, and their echoing and reflection through multiple histories. I find the literatures of many different cultures fascinating, as each has a unique way of seeing and saying. It makes me feel more closely connected to the diverse people of the planet, not just the more dominant groups and their values.
While I now mainly use online language resources for day-to day work, one of the occupational hazards of working with language is ending up with lots of reference books on the bookshelf. Just recently I came across something I’d almost forgotten was there:
Geneviève Blum, with illustrations by Nestor Salas, Les Idiomatics : français – anglais, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989).
It’s a slim volume that presents a list of French idioms with their English equivalent, along with a literal French back translation of this. Both the French original idiom and its English equivalent are graphically represented by a small illustration. The book is one of a series that (presumably) presents foreign-language equivalents of the same set of French idioms. A quick search of the internet reveals that other languages in the series include German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. The books are apparently based a French television series produced sometime in the late 1980s, and developed by Blum herself.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an idiom as “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words”. Something that is perhaps implicit in this definition is that the group of words in question normally allows for little or no variation, it is a frozen pattern of language.
Although some idioms can also have a literal meaning (e.g. the English idiom “to take someone for a ride”), the fact that all have a meaning that can’t be deduced from their individual components only makes things more confusing when you start comparing idioms between languages. To take just a couple of the examples presented in Les Idiomatics, why does something “cost an arm and a leg” in English, but coûte les yeux de la tête (cost the eyes in your head) in French? Why should we “let sleeping dogs lie” but ne pas réveiller le chat qui dort (not wake the sleeping cat)?
The truth is, we don’t really know why. As Mona Baker says in In Other Words1,
“The way a language chooses to express, or not express, various meanings cannot be predicted and only occasionally matches the way another language chooses to express the same meanings.”
However, perhaps a clue lies in the etymology of the word idiom. It comes from the ancient Greek, idiōma, which actually meant “private property”. The fact that idioms are the “private property” of a given language makes them notoriously difficult to translate, and there is plenty of research to say that someone’s ability to use idioms in a foreign language almost never matches that of a native speaker. Coincidently, this is one of the reasons that both the American Translator’s Association and the UK Institute of Translation & Interpreting consider it a best practice to only translate into your mother tongue.
Hence, perhaps, the need for books like Les Idiomatics, which seems like a great introduction to a subject that someone like me finds fascinating. While there are now longer comparative lists of idioms available online, I haven’t seen any that look as charming as this book. It’s made all the more memorable thanks to Nestor Salas’s colourful illustrations that frequently reveal the almost surreal nature of the phrases in question.
Because idioms themselves aren’t copyright material, I’ve reproduced the full list included in Les Idiomatics : français – anglais, with a few minor changes, along with a literal French translation of the English idiom in a downloadable document. For completeness, I’ve also added a literal English translation of the French idiom. Hopefully this will help you to use either language a little more like a native speaker.
Does anyone remember the TV series these books were based on? Does anyone have one of the other books in the series? It would be great to hear from you.
1 Mona Baker, In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, (2nd edn., Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011)
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