French translation potential
May 20th, 2009- France is recognized all over the world for its architecture, tourist interest, art, delicious food, fine wine, fashion and perfumes.
- The French language is the second most popular and influential language of the world. It is the first or second language of people living in 54 countries and 5 continents.
- Canada has a native French speaking population of more than 7 million people. Since the country shares its borders with the United States, transporting goods is easy giving rise to profitable export opportunities. The Canadian government has made it mandatory for all documents, brochures, and guides etc to be written in French, which gives rise to abundant French translation opportunities.
- French is used as an official language in many international organizations including U.N. Along with the diplomatic world it plays an influential role in the corporate world too.
- Apart from many European countries, parts of Africa, islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean, French is also widely used in Asian countries like Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. These countries require their key personnel like diplomats, scientific personnel, and managers among others to be able to speak French. The Japanese youth prefer to get education in tourism, architecture and fashion designing from France. Even Korea prefers French over Japanese. The business and political leaders of China and Hong Kong also prefer using French.
French and English translations – The Challenging Aspects
May 10th, 2009Though there is a reasonable number of similarities between the French and English languages, French to English and English to French translation is not exactly a cakewalk. There are certain potential areas of pitfalls which if not taken into account can result into botched up translations.
Though they belong to the same family of languages that is the Indo-European family, French and English split long back and have over the years become quite strict about their distinct identities. The differences have largely risen from the divergent literary traditions of the two languages.
The English language frowns upon long sentences, while on the other hand it is quite common to find such sentences in French. So while translating from French into English, a language translation expert has to ensure that all such long sentences should be broken into palatable pieces for English readers. If this is not done then the translation would make for a difficult and clumsy read. However, breaking up sentences has its own peril that is one has to do away with the pace of the original content. So a translator has to manage this part very carefully to ensure that there is minimum loss in translation.
The other frequent area of problem in French English translation stems from the fact that French uses verb conjugation and noun gender while English uses conjugation only sometimes and grammatical gender never. This creates problems in the proper positioning of noun phrases and their modifiers in French to English translations.
