A difficult translation

English is a very unusual language.

Our tutoring consultant was tasked to look over a bit of French one of his students had written, last week or the week before.  It was French IV and our consultant was out of practice, so there was a moment of uncertainty as he anticipated that he might have forgotten some necessary nuances and details of the language.  He needn’t have worried.  There were clear Englishisms to be corrected, which allowed enough work for the session.

The first went something like, “You can find this ingredient in your local Trader Joe’s.”  Translated word-for-word it renders grammatically into French, but it doesn’t mean the same thing.  The English implies a sort of impersonal availability.  Here, “you” doesn’t mean the person sitting in front of me, but someone in general; it could be rendered in the passive voice, “This can be found at Trader Joe’s.”  In French it means that the specific person being addressed (made more specific by being conjugated in the singular familiar form) could do it, and maybe no one else.  The meaning is better translated by a French construction back-rendered as, “One can find,” which no doubt we swiped from them somewhere along the line.

Not grammatical at all was “est fait de.”  This was the end of a sentence that works in English: “Tell me what this dish is made of.”  In no other language we’re aware of is it even possible to end a sentence with a preposition.  Translating this idea from English to Spanish or French or whatever can be a stumbling-block to students, who are used to the construction and are forced to think in unfamiliar ways to express the same idea.  This turns out to be an ancient English mode of working, to put a preposition after the word it refers to.  In one of our Old English texts occurs the phrase, “him to cwað.”  The last word is pronounced “kwath” and means “said;” after some mutation over the years it lives on as “quoth,” as in, “Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'”  The other two words have the same meaning as in modern English.  So the old version exactly reverses the order we’d use today: “said to him.”

Well, in the pedantic past we were told not to end a sentence with a preposition even in English (a restriction Churchill famously ridiculed).  The rule probably originated from the fact that it couldn’t be done in the classical languages.  Also originating in academia was the law not to split infinitives: no word was allowed between “to” and “split,” because in other languages the infinitive is a single word.  This rule, we note, has been largely discarded in recent years, for the good reason that there is no reason for it in English.  In fact one could say there is a useful nuance of meaning in some such splitting.  When one of our students said, “I wanted really badly to not go,” it was not a passive avoidance of attending she meant, but some positive action in another direction.

In this English is only returning to its roots.  Old English not only had a positive verb “wyllan,” meaning will/intend or want, but a negative verb “nyllan,” meaning to not will/intend or want something.  This pair survives in the form “willy-nilly,” meaning originally whether you want it or not.

English can be very expressive, and will generally ignore any rules it finds over-restrictive.  But it can be really difficult to translate from.