An Antique Dealer's Diary: A Strange Little Theatre by Yvonne de Bremond d'Ars -- A Translation

Abstract

Many people are under the impression that to translate a book is to "take the easy way out," in this case meaning out of the Senior Thesis requirement. I would like to challenge anyone to go through the experience and still make the same claim. A translator runs into many problems. Discovering just the right word to fit in a certain spot often takes much thought and struggling. What a frustrating experience to know there is such a word and be unable to think of it! "Write it so it sounds good in English," may sound like simple instructions for a native speaker of English to follow, but when working closely with the foreign language, English words substituted into the French structures begin to sound perfectly logical, until reread or read aloud to someone else. Then there are always the places where the author's meaning is hard to grasp or where her description doesn't evoke a mind's-eye picture. Just how freely to translate and how drastically to rearrange sentences also has to be decided. In hopes of retaining a little of the French flavor, I used the words "Madame" and "Monsieur" rather than "Mrs." and "Mr." and kept as much as possible to the French proper nouns.