Translating French

Translating French


I'm currently working on a contract that requires me to translate a French story into English. This was one of those projects that I had a chance to take and decided to take for a simple reason. I'd never done a French translation before, and how hard could it actually be?
To tell the truth, it's not hard. It's weird, but not difficult.
My method is simple. I just copy a block of text and paste it into the Google translation engine. Then I take the fragmented, disordered, random words that the engine spits out and string them together into some order. If I'm lucky, there's something helpful to work with and I can just fill in the blanks. If the stars are alligned against me, the words might as well been pulled from someone's shopping list.
What is interesting is to see how language works. I used to think that tranlating would be a simple process. All you'd have to do is replace the word what one culture calls a thing with the same word in English. QED. If a Spanish story uses the word "Sappotos", I'd write "Shoes".
Of course, there's much more than that.
While individual words can be translated 1-to-1 (for the most part), the concepts behind the words have a tougher time. It really illustrates how communication works."

Take that last sentence for example. "It illustrates how communication works."

To translate word-for-word, we'd have:

It = that
really = very
illustrates = draw
how = what
communication = talking
works = does

So Google would likely give you something like "Very what talking does that drawing."

The cool part about translating is knowing that word order and even the words themselves aren't as important as the concept. If half the concept survives intact, your brain just fills in the rest. So using a little creativity, we might get:

"Concrete words are most effective."

OK, it's not perfect. But you understand what what I'm saying. Heh heh.