Here
Today I was framing a whole bunch of a doctor's diplomas and medical certificates--like, ten. One of them contained this phrase or a close approximation of it:
We declare to these presents that XXX has attained the title of Doctor of Medicine.
"These presents"!
My first thought was, "A typo! On a doctor's certificate!" But as I kept framing them, I noticed that some of them were in both English and French (as is the way in Canada) and it finally dawned on me that what I had been looking at wasn't a typo, exactly, but a mistranslation.
In French, certain adjectives can attain the status of nouns meaning "those who are" or "one who is" when preceded by an article. (English allows a lot of liberty with the various parts of speech, but not that.) The title of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables in English becomes not "The Miserables", which sounds like a family name, but "The Wretches" or some such. In French, the phrase "les présents" means "those present" or "those who are present", but if you're translating directly, without a strong sense of English, you might well come up with "those presents", or, if the original phrase was "ces présents" ("these people who are present"), "these presents". It's perfectly good French, but English? Not so much.
I still can't quite believe that nobody caught it.
We declare to these presents that XXX has attained the title of Doctor of Medicine.
"These presents"!
My first thought was, "A typo! On a doctor's certificate!" But as I kept framing them, I noticed that some of them were in both English and French (as is the way in Canada) and it finally dawned on me that what I had been looking at wasn't a typo, exactly, but a mistranslation.
In French, certain adjectives can attain the status of nouns meaning "those who are" or "one who is" when preceded by an article. (English allows a lot of liberty with the various parts of speech, but not that.) The title of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables in English becomes not "The Miserables", which sounds like a family name, but "The Wretches" or some such. In French, the phrase "les présents" means "those present" or "those who are present", but if you're translating directly, without a strong sense of English, you might well come up with "those presents", or, if the original phrase was "ces présents" ("these people who are present"), "these presents". It's perfectly good French, but English? Not so much.
I still can't quite believe that nobody caught it.
posted by pyramus | 11:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home