Learning French: beware of bilingual instructions
Language notes from a lecturer on the pitfalls of translation
Take care before reading this label
Idiomatic expressions have danger written all over them, but even ‘ordinary’ translation is full of pitfalls and pratfalls.
Consider the recto-verso bilingual tags that arrived from Britain with particularly comfortable brushed-cotton nightwear. That a respectable firm should not have considered it appropriate or worthwhile to engage a professional translator is of course scandalous: it shows contempt for the foreign buyer, for the art of translation and for the firm’s own reputation.
But how exactly was this masterpiece of absurdity achieved? Could someone in the firm have admitted to having failed French at GCSE and then painstakingly gone through a pocket dictionary word by word to produce such nonsense?
Such gems as que y Mai être for ‘that there may be’ seem to suggest such an approach, but much else beggars belief.
No attempt is made at translating ‘would’; perhaps the lesson on the conditional tense was missed.
Would a French reader, without any English, understand the washing instructions? My guess is that s/he would rather feel the texture of the cloth and cautiously set the machine to 30 degrees.
Read more: Letters: Readers share their French language howlers
