French translations can be delightful... when done wrong

Whenever someone tells me they really want to learn French I always ask them why. 

For one thing, you can get away without it in a world in which English is the lingua franca. For another, technology will do the translating for you; so why bother putting in the hours? My answer – why I want to know French – is twofold. 

One is that you can only appreciate the mindset of someone, and therefore empathise with them, if you speak their language. 

The other is that there is a great deal of enjoyment to be had from understanding how one language differs from another, and how they interact.

Indeed, Connexion  readers frequently report delightful mistranslations that they have seen and heard. 

As a sometime translator, I am acutely aware of all the many pitfalls that await someone who is not alert to the dangers of false friends, idioms, franglais and, worse, forgetting words in your own language.

Read more:  Can you master these 10 French tongue twisters?

Recently I was pleased to discover a text that takes the comparison of English and French to the level of mastery, making the point that every translator should be a good writer who must transform a text with originality, not rely on dictionary definitions.

Mark Twain's translation

The American writer Mark Twain (1835-1910) was so disappointed by the wooden French translation of one of his stories, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, that he decided to re-translate it back into English – literally. 

The result is a splendid, curious work with the unbeatable title of The Jumping Frog: In English, then in French, then clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil. It was published in 1903 but retains all its charm.

As an introduction to his text, Twain tells the reader that the French “always tangle up everything to that degree when you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to get out alive or not”.

This is followed by the original English version of the story, the French translation of it and Twain’s own translation of the French back into English. “I cannot speak the French language,” says Twain, “but I can translate very well.”

Read more: Learning French: nouns that even native speakers commonly misgender

Unreliable text

He then launches into the lamest text you could hope, or rather fear, to read. It is English, of course, and it can be enjoyed at first degree, but if you are halfway competent at French you will get much out of it. 

It starts with the words: “It there was one time here…” and includes such phrases as “You me believe if you will...”, “What is this then that you have there shut up within?", “her jaw inferior commence to project like a deck before…” and “I no have not a frog; but if of it I had one…” 

On the way, he throws in French words when he feels like it and intervenes in parentheses in his story to chastise the French translator for using one exclamation mark too many.

Twain knows he is being a little unkind because the French translator was an admirer of his work, but behind the playful nature of the exercise is a serious point that we all need to learn. The two languages do not approach the same idea in the same way and there is not always an exact equivalent for an English word or phrase in French. 

A translator must be prepared to extemporise – although I am sure that had the unfortunate French writer in this case done so, Twain would have excoriated him for taking liberties with his text.

I’ll let you enjoy the rest of Mark Twain’s cheeky riposte yourself. His new version starts on p39 of The Jumping Frog.