OT: French translations

Jerry Friedman · 05 Aug 2009, 17:06 · from 2009-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 10:06:37 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) OT: French translations
In-Reply-To: <fy09ow4y5d9ofmyx39UYAxe124vaj_firegpg at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <786475.3868.qm at web50702.mail.re2.yahoo.com>

--- On Wed, 8/5/09, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Jerry
> Friedman<jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > --- On Wed, 8/5/09, gwern0 at gmail.com
> <gwern0 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Hi everyone. This is a rather
> >> off-topic request, but bear with me. I'm
> desultorily
> >> learning myself some French this summer, and I've
> decided
> >> that since I'm only really interested in reading
> French (and
> >> not so much in speaking or writing it), that the
> best thing
> >> to do would be to simply translate some large
> French work
> >> into English and learn as I go*.
> >
> > Si tu m'avais pos? la question, je t'aurais dit que
> c'est
> > compl?tement fou. ?Mais tu te connais ? toi-m?me,
> et moi
> > je ne te connais pas.
> 
> Ouch. It seemed like a good idea to me - if I want to read
> French, then the logical direction is French->English,
> not vice-versa....

What I was thinking of as crazy was taking on a large
work and giving yourself the extra task of putting it
into good English, instead of just reading something
that interests you.  However, I may have underestimated
your knowledge of French.

> > I don't know any, but have you tried searching for
> "Gene
> > Wolfe" on French-language pages (using Google
> Advanced
> > Search, for example)? ?Or searching http://www.amazon.fr/ ?
> 
> Amazon has a very impressive selection of Wolfe works - I
> was expecting to see Book of the New Sun at most, but I see
> Fifth Head of Cerberus, New Sun, Long Sun, Wizard-Knight,
> The Island of Doctor Death (strangely, it's just 'L'?le du
> docteur Mort et autres histoires'. Maybe the publisher
> didn't get the joke.), the Book of Days, Peace... But same
> objection as with Brunians.
...

I seem to have left out my point.  I was hoping you could
find an essay on Wolfe or a review of one of his writings.
And I didn't realize you wanted a free text.

Jerry Friedman

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net