Good French Translator: The Medium and The Message

A good French translator must have excellent writing skills in both English and French.  This something you hear all the time – and it’s true.  But it doesn’t mean that the French translator’s job is to be a creative writer.  A much better comparison is a messenger.

What this means is that the skills needed by a good messenger are also the skills that are needed to be a good French translator.  Nowadays the role of messenger is redundant – we have plenty of other means of fast long-distance communication: e-mail, telephone, fax etc.  But before we had all these, the only way to get a message to somebody a long way away was to send a human being.  Think of Pheidippides who ran 26 miles to bring the news of the Athenians’ victory over the Persians at Marathon!

So what are the skills that a good messenger needed, and those you need today to be a good French translator?

Comprehension

A messenger would not have been much use if he did not understand the message in the first place!  For instance if Pheidippides had thought that the Athenians had been beaten by the Persians rather than having beaten them, history might have taken a very different course! 

To be a good French translator you absolutely must have a thorough understanding of the text you are translating into French.  This means that, assuming French is your first language, you must have a high-level knowledge of English, preferably to graduate level, plus an in-depth experience of contemporary English usage and idiom. 

Clarity

Clarity goes along with comprehension.  The old-style messenger needed not just to think he understood the message but to be absolutely clear about its meaning.  This meant that at times he had to go over it with the originator of the message.  If he had pretended to understand when he didn’t, his employers would not have been pleased with him!

To be a good French translator, the first thing you need to do at the beginning of the task is to identify ambiguities or possible discrepancies in the original text, before even thinking about starting to translate it.  (These aren’t difficulties that arise from your imperfect understanding of the language but genuine ambiguities – virtually all texts contain at least some.)  If possible you must contact the writer or originator of the text to clarify the ambiguities – if not possible, you must find someone who has been associated with the production of the material.  Only if neither of these is possible – for example if you are translating something from another period of history – should you make the best possible guess based on the context.

Communication

It goes without saying that a messenger had to be a good communicator!  Often his message was of the utmost importance.  People chosen as messengers were chosen for their ability to get the message across. 

To be a good French translator you very much have to be a good a communicator.  In fact some would say you are first and foremost a communicator.   Once you have thoroughly understood the message in the original text, your job is to abstract this message from the English forms, and convey it in French so that it will be clearly understood.  It really does help to think of yourself as a messenger.  Keep in mind that you have a message to convey to your readers, on behalf of the originator of the source text, and that it is your task to get that message across as accurately as possible.

Completeness

A messenger needed to be absolutely sure he got the whole message across.  If he left anything out, he was not doing his job.  Of course Pheidippides’ message only consisted of one word, so it was difficult to leave anything out of that!  But many messages would have been much more complex.

We know that to be a good French translator you are not required to be an author – you are not expected to embellish or add to the message in any way.  But equally, you are not expected to leave anything out.  You have to decide what message is conveyed in the original text and make sure you put it across fully in your translation.  It’s a common complaint from clients that there are lots of omissions in a submitted translation.

One difficulty when translating from one language to another is that words don’t have an exact equivalence between languages.  You can’t always translate one word in the source language by the same word in the target language – sometimes you won’t get the complete sense.   Take the English words “suburb” and “suburban”.  In US English a suburb is an area which is neither urban nor rural, but a pleasant place to live with trees and gardens.  In the UK the word is used for an area on the outskirts of a large city, but still usually regarded as respectable and quite a pleasant area with plenty of space   The word “suburban” is often used as opposed to “inner-city” and connotes affluent as opposed to deprived, but also it can often be used quite contemptuously and have a connotation of being small-minded and over-concerned with respectability.  “Suburban” is often translated into French as “de la banlieue”.  However “la banlieue” in French simply refers to the outskirts of the city and usually refers to the ugly deprived housing estates which are often located on the perimeters of cities.  If you want to translate “suburb” or “suburban”, a good French translator will have to decide whether to add some extra text to ensure you include the full connotations of the original word.  

Cultural consciousness

The Greek God Hermes, who was the God of messengers, was the messenger from the gods to the humans.  He is in fact sometimes referred to as a translator, because it was his job to express the messages from the Gods in the language of the humans.  The same is true of “angels” in the Bible – the word “angel” comes from the Greek word for “messenger”, anggelos.  The angels had to express God’s messages in a way humans would understand.  The messages weren’t just words – the divine messengers had to give expression to what they were conveying in a completely different context – the world of the divine to the world of the human.

As a good French translator it’s not only the words themselves you are concerned with.  You can’t separate the words from their cultural context.  So your knowledge of both the source culture and the target culture has to be as good as your knowledge of the actual languages.  And of course the cultures are different depending on where the languages are spoken.  For instance the cultural differences between France and the UK are not the same as the differences between France and the USA, or the differences between French-speaking Canadians and English-speaking Canadians!  So if you are translating the phrase “public school” into French from a UK context it will be école privée, from a US context it will be école publique!

Co-operation

The messenger didn’t just decide to go off somewhere and deliver a message.  He went because he was sent!  Delivering a message was always a co-operative effort.

If you want to be a good French translator, it’s no good being an individualist.  It’s essential to co-operate with the client at every stage to make sure you are putting across the message that was actually intended. Plus you usually need at least one other person to look over your translation.  Never forget that the translator is always part of a team.