J’adore la langue français!
I adore the French language!
I’ve studied French since I was about ten years old. I read books in French, practice with French music, and sometimes hold conversations in French. Lately, I’ve been debating doing a French translation of some of my work. I don’t really have a French readership, so this would be more of a pet project.
Admittedly, I’ve never taken on a big translation project before. And I’ve only ever officially translated French to English. However, it is an easy project to break into parts. And I can include a polite disclaimer saying that French is not my first language. There are, however, some potential problems.
Let me give some examples. Since I’m not a native speaker, I do sometimes confuse colloquialisms. Also, French has more verb tenses than English does, so I would have to determine the dominant tense of the work before making a translation (and, since I’m not great with passé simple, I probably wouldn’t be using the more dominant literary tense). There’s also the fact that people assume I’m Canadian (I’m not).
I’ve never taken on that big of a translation project before, but it is an easy project to break into parts. I would also be using a translation software I already have to help check my work / streamline the process. But, there’s the other problem: I’m recalling an indie writer on amazon who disclosed the use of translation software in the international additions of her books. She was slammed by troll reports through amazon until those books were taken down (by amazon, not by her). I do not need to put myself in that situation.
Right now, I’m just floating the idea. But maybe I will translate one of my website shorts for the why not of it.
(As a side note, I am trying to get better at blogging. I wrote three of these blog posts at one time as a batch blogging attempt. This is the third, but I might not be posting them in order.)
