Re: off topic: Grammer Question

[Caballero Carlo.Caballero@xxxxxxxx]

On Tue, 24 May 2005, John wrote:
> Examples given:
>
> - a Chinese silk wedding dress (which happens to
> leave it open whether it's the silk or the dress
> which is Chinese).
> - some short blue denim jeans
> - an awful old stair carpet
>
> It's certainly something which is taught to learners.
>
> The order in French is slightly different, though
> off the cuff I can't say just how.
> John
>

You note the uncertainty of meaning (what modifies wha?t) in the typical
English pile-up "a Chinese silk wedding dress," and it's precisely this
ambiguity that French (and some other languages) can't tolerate. I think
the phrase would be either:

une robe de noces fabriqué en soie de Chine (if the silk is Chinese)

or

une robe de noces chinoise faite en soie (if the silk is from, say,
Nicaragua)

Others on this list may be able to produce better French renderings.

There are some English phrases that leave so much unclear that the
translator simply needs to know more than the bare words can deliver
(e.g., "invariable false calculation trap routine"). A Canadian
translator--I think his name was Christian Allègre--once pointed out that
his job, which involved translating technical documents from English to
French for the ISO (or some such) often resulted in his asking questions
that made the authors of the original English document revise their prose
to make it clearer. (I remember his comment from a listserve called
"BALZAC" that I haven't subscribed to since the last century...)

Carlo

Carlo.Caballero@xxxxxxxx