And in British English we would say "it starts on Friday night"
We create a lot of French-English content here at Kwiziq, including reading comprehension exercises, writing challenges, dictées, and of course examples in lessons. Aurélie and I are both bilingual, but with different mother tongues: she’s French and I’m American. We proofread each other’s work, and since we’re both linguists, teachers, and translators, we manage to come up with solutions to most translation problems. That niggly little "most" inspired me to start keeping track of the ones where we found we had no choice but to replace an untranslatable bit with something simpler.
Translation is definitely an art, not a science – it’s very rare for there to be only one correct way to translate something, so translators are constantly making choices between two or more similar words or phrases in an attempt to remain as faithful as possible to the original author’s intent. This is easier in some domains, like science, than in others, such as poetry. For the latter, it’s essential to consider not only meaning, but the fundamentals of poetry itself: rhythm, rhyme, the beauty of the language … it’s tricky, to be sure. But I digress.
The point is that translators generally have some leeway in their choices. However, when it comes to an educational site like Kwiziq, we have to be careful about taking too much poetic license, especially when it comes to our writing challenges, where the goal is for you to translate an English phrase into French, and then score yourself against the "correct" answer. While we can offer a few options, we can’t list every possible translation, so we have to choose the English phrases carefully to try to keep the list of correct answers manageable. And of course we have to make sure that there aren’t any mistakes or potential for confusion. Here are some examples where we had to compromise.
Avec mon fidèle compagnon à quatre pattes Milou, nous avons visité de nombreux pays.
This was the sentence Aurélie originally wrote, but when translated into English, it became "With my faithful four-legged companion Snowy, we’ve visited many countries." I suspect native English speakers will immediately spot the same thing I did: the use of "we" makes it sound like there’s a third party, which is not the case. In French, the use of nous is perfectly acceptable here to mean just the two of us, but for accuracy’s sake, we had to change the English to "I’ve visited."
On y passait toutes nos journées
This elegant French phrase becomes clunky in English: "We spent all day every day there." Despite a slight loss in meaning, we had to cut it down to "We spent every day there." (See our lesson on jour vs journée.)
Ça commence dès vendredi soir
Another case where French’s elegance is unmatched: "It begins as soon as Friday night." We just wouldn’t say that in English, so it became simply "It begins Friday night."
choisir le roi ou la reine de son cœur
Literally, "to choose the king or queen of his heart," this lovely French expression was to be part of our article on la Galette des Rois. "Heart’s desire" didn’t work since it was referring to a child choosing among family members – so obviously not an amorous relationship. We ended up completely rewording the sentence.
The bottom line
Translation is a fascinating, tricky endeavor. Obviously, it’s essential to speak both languages extremely well (and to understand the cultures behind them), but there’s more to it than that. The more you practice, the more you’ll get a sense of how translation works, how you can bend and mold the language to maintain the original author’s intent while at the same time making sure to be idiomatic in the target language. There’s no such thing as a perfect translation, but some are definitely better than others!
These problems are orders of magnitude more complicated when it comes to computerized solutions – check out my article Online Translators: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Translations
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Author info
Laura is a French expert and Kwiziq's Head of Quality Control. Online educator since '99, Laura is passionate about language, travel, and cooking. She's American by birth and a permanent ex-pat by choice - freelancing made it possible for her to travel extensively and live in several countries before settling permanently in Guadeloupe. Laura is the author of Lawless French, Lawless Spanish, and other websites and books on French, Spanish, Italian, English, and vegetarianism. She spends most of her spare time reading, playing with food, and enjoying water sports.
Aurélie is our resident French Expert. She has created most of the wonderful content you see on the site and is usually the person answering your tricky help questions. She comes from a small village near Chartres in Central France, country of cereal fields and not much else. She left (in a hurry) to study English at the world-famous Sorbonne in Paris, before leaving France in 2007 to experience the “London lifestyle” - and never looked back! She's worked as a professional French teacher, translator and linguist in the UK since. She loves to share her love of languages and is a self-professed cinema and literature geek!