Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
Your English seems pretty much perfect - judging by what you write here. 
With language skills that good, I'm curious (as someone who'll never find out personally  ) whether it matters which language you read in.
Do you still find French significantly easier than English? |
actually it's not really a question of ease, it's more a question of the quality of the reading experience, but yes i find it does matter. as i've recently written a long answer about my thoughts on the subject elsewhere i'm just going to copy and paste it... pretty soon i'm going to write a thesis about this subject.
i prefer to read in the original text if possible. if not possible, i prefer to read a translation into french of italian or spanish, generally, but a translation into english of german or dutch. but there could be exceptions, depending on the style / subject of the text. i think each language has its own "colour" or "texture" which adds as much to the meaning as the individual words chosen, because it adds to the ambiance of the text. this is partly created by the vocabularly, depending on the roots of the words, and partly on the syntaxe, the way sentences can be structured and such.
for example, french is very good for talking about beauty or tenderness or love or abstract philosophical ideas in a precise and eloquent way without sounding sentimental or juvenile, which is not so easy in english ; it's hard to avoid sounding either vulgar or childish (and even in describing this phenomenon i am demonstrating it, because what i REALLY would like to say is "mièvre" and "niais" but i can't think of a good english equivalent ! for "mièvre," the dictionary proposes "affected," "dainty" and "vapid", none of them is quite right).
but english can communicate really percussive ideas and create short, dynamic, brutal sentences, which require longer paraphrases in french because of the grammatical structure and so lose some of their impact. so, you *can* write a noir detective novel in french, but i think there is a reason the most famous ones are written in english (chandler, hammett...). and of course, in english you can easily make up super-hero names like "Vocabulary Girl" which really don't translate into french very well, and that is frustrating sometimes !!
a good translation can be *almost* as good as reading the original. a bad translation can ruin a brilliant book for you. so i prefer to keep all the chances on my side and read a version which has the best chance of conveying the tone as well as the litteral meaning of the original.
as an example of the difference between french and english in mysteries i was recently struck by this paragraph from the latest mystery by Fred Vargas (a french writer who really epitomises for me the french intellectual / philosophical mystery style, almost to the point of being a caricature of the concept but
not quite, and one of my favorite authors) :
"Ici ressurgit à pleine puissance l'antagonisme qui divisait les members de la Brigade entre les positivistes matérialistes que les errances d'Adamsberg indisposaient gravement, parfois jusqu'à la révolte, et ceux plus conciliants qui ne voyaient pas le mal à pelleter des nuages de temps à autre."
--Fred Vargas,
Un Lieu Incertain
my rather feeble attempt at a translation :
"Here burst forth at full strength the antagonism which divided the members of the Brigade, between the materialistic positivists whom the wanderings of Adamsberg gravely indisposed, sometimes to the point of revolt, and those more conciliatory who saw no harm in shovelling clouds from time to time."
i don't know how a professional translator would fare with that paragraph (hopefully better than me). but it seems to me really to capture the difference between the french polar and the english noir mystery, on every point : language, concept, style... in french it reads very well ; in english, no doubt at least partly due to my translation but also because english is the wrong colour for this, it seems stilted to me and rather ungainly.
as a counter example, i first read Dorothy Sayers and SS Van Dine both in french. i think the translations were fairly decent and i liked both authors very well. but when i finally was able to read the original books in english, i found them much more lively witty than the translations had been able to render.
anyway i hope i've answered your question...