Gardening and Translation

Gardening
The weather has continued to be changeable but with sufficient good spells to allow some gardening and the odd game of boules. The hanging baskets are now planted although it will be a few weeks before they really start to look good. And the back garden is starting to take shape. The couple of salvia pratensis I pinched from the roadside last year have not only survived but also self-seeded, so I now have four of them. I've also identified some poppies coming up, gifts from the wind or birds no doubt, and one sunflower which surely came from one of the bird feeders. That apart, I've planted some tigridia pavonia and transferred two redcurrant salvia from pots in the front that they were taking over. A planned visit to a big garden centre just outside Avignon next week should see the main shape of the back garden in place. And my seeds are starting to germinate: stocks, tomatoes and broccoli all showing, plus (so far) one morning glory from seed collected off the plants I grew last year.

More Translation
The translation of the guided tour is now “finished”, meaning subject to second thoughts, of which there will be some. I'm going to Daniel's tomorrow lunchtime to meet with him and Jean-François Colonat to make final adjustments. The English text has come out to about 4/5 of the French, which is about right and should leave some space for photos and maps. Just as well we are not doing a German version, which would have been at least 30% longer than the English.

Two points emerged for me from the translation work. First, I seem to be losing my English fluency in proportion to my gain in fluency in French. I took the precaution of asking friends Steve and Jo to read the text for infelicities, of which they found several. In particular, I had translated monument aux morts as monument to the dead, which of course it is. But that is not what we say; we say “war memorial”.

Most of the other inelegancies they found were the result of very long sentences in French. I eventually found a method to tackle these but didn't always manage a good English version. The method was firstly to parse the French sentence into clauses, then translate the clauses, then find the best way of combining the clauses into English sentences. That should have given me the best chance of producing a good English version but still resulted in some clumsy phrasing. I found that one long French sentence generally became 2-3 English sentences.