The historic relation of French and English languages
French and English are positioned as the world’s most powerful languages and it is quite unlikely that the situation would change in the coming few years or even decades. Both languages share a very interesting history between them, awareness of which would provide French translators with a new perspective on the language.
Both French and English have descended from proto-Indo-European family of languages. However, they split from the Indo-European genealogy long back.
French once dominated England, when the Normans ruled Britain for over 300 years from the 11th century onwards. Where French was the language of preference at the royal court, English developed as the common language of the public. However, during the Norman rule English absorbed a substantial number of words from the French vocabulary, so much so that at present about 25 to 30 percent of the modern English vocabulary consists of words having French origins.
The opposite has also happened, that is English words finding their way into French especially after English became the more popularly used language. There is consequently a large body of cognate words that is words which have been directly borrowed from English to French and French to English. Examples of the former are weekend and marketing, while examples of the latter are moustache and ballet among many others.
The relation between the two languages makes French to English and English to French translation easier compared to other language pairs.
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