Que demandait-il 'a sa tante, et comment re'pondait-elle?
English translation: What did he ask his aunt and what was her reply?
| 17:52 Oct 15, 2001 |
| French to English translations [Non-PRO] Art/Literary | ||||
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|  Selected response from: BernieM Canada Local time: 14:21 | |||
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| 5 | How to approach a Maigret novel |
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| 4 | What did he ask his aunt and what was her reply? |
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Answers
12 mins confidence: 
What did he ask his aunt and what was her reply? Explanation: I have put "his aunt" on the assumption that the asker (il) and the aunt (sa tante) are connected. However, it could also be referring to someone else's aunt e.g. What did he ask her aunt and what was her reply". |
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2 hrs confidence:
How to approach a Maigret novel Explanation: This is what is called a "leading question." Go through your text and find the part that it most closely relates to. Use this to help you understand what the story--and the French--is about. Dear Mr/Ms dlclakel, KudoZ' mission is providing translators who have terminology questions with some help. Translating a whole text, and even more so, a whole book (!) is really a translation job, not support for fellow translators helping each other out. I'd recommend a couple of other ProZ links instead: 1. Get a good [X] to [Y] translator to handle your job. There are many excellent translators on ProZ. In the case of your text, which really also requires the talents of a good copywriter, this would be especially important. To find one in the language combination you require (i.e., [X] to [Y]), go to the following URL: http://www.proz.com/index.php3?sp=wi&sid= and select [X] as the "source" language and [Y] as the target one. You may enter other criteria on the following page. 2. You can also find a translator by placing an ad on ProZ. To do this, "Search for pros" on the **lefthand** side of the main page of ProZ: http://www.proz.com/ 3. If you can't afford a translator, use an online automatic translator. For example: http://www.freetranslations.com/ A word of warning: an automatic translator only gives an approximate translation of the original. To check if the text is adequately rendered, I'd recommend doing a back translation (translating it back into the original language before making use of it. 4. The Maigret novels have all been translated into English. Your public library can no doubt supply you with a translation of the one you are working on for a lot less trouble than you have been going to, posting sentences from that book, one by one. And, finally, may I make an observation: as a retired French professor who is very much still in touch with the profession at both the college and high school levels, I can assure you that your current approach to your assignment will not help you complete your course. Here are a couple of tips for reading a book in a foreign language: 1. Look over the whole page. DON'T look anything up! This is so you can get a fuller picture of the text. 2. Now, from what you DID recognize on the page, write down a one-sentence summary (in English, if it will make you feel more comfortable). I think you will be surprised at how much you did understand without any further checking of the dictionary. 3. Go over the text again, this time paragraph by paragraph. What parts of the text that you didn't understand do you think are important enough to investigate further? Go over those parts again, look at the words surrounding the ones that you didn't understand, and use them to GUESS the meaning of the parts you don't get. 4. There are probably still a few things you just can't figure out, that you need to know if you are going to follow the rest of the story. Look those words up in the dictionary. Et voilà! So much faster than typing in all those sentences, isn't it!? Yours truly, Yolanda Stern Broad, Ph.D. Moderator, ProZ French to English Community |
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