It would appear that the faster we all go, the behinder we all get. (I know that has little to do with the subject, but you have to let me go about this in my own way...)
I recall once finding a carbon copy of a letter my mother wrote to a customer when she, as a young college student, worked at the old Scribner's book store in Manhattan. In that prehistoric era, you see, folks would write letters to big-city bookstores and ask all manner of what amounted to research questions. The inquiry my mother was responding to was from someone who wanted to know the name of the richest person in the world. The answer my mother typed was very nondescript, naming nobody, making general allusions to names such as Rockefeller, et al., and thanking the correspondent for writing, but what I personally found interesting about that letter was that there were no erasure marks on the copy. (Yes, I know, I'm a weird one. C'est la vie!)
That letter is evidence that there was once a time when business letters were typed with few, if any, errors.
If we turn on the fast-forward for a few decades and then go back to normal playing speed, we might find me at my first summer job, working as an expediter for a large Manhattan engineering design firm. The procedure for writing a business letter (or an expediting report) was to write the thing out in longhand and give it to a secretary, who would return it to the originator for corrections (and there were always corrections).
I was perpetually amazed at just how much white-out you could smear on a piece of paper and still have it pass under the platen of an IBM typewriter. I swear, with the proper coloring, some of those letters would resemble a scale model of the Rocky Mountains, as viewed from some altitude.
In any event, the secretary and I would shuttle the paper back and forth until it was right and then run it over to the Xerox room and have the operator burn a sharp (and more important: two-dimensional!) copy that would eventually find its way to the addressee.
What does this have to do with French translation? Hold on...
There was presumably a time, early in the last century, when something like the Encyclopedia Britannica would have been scads more accurate than something like today's Wikipedia, simply because there were a lot of well-educated people around available to work on it, whose wages didn't greatly affect the bottom line of what was being sold.
In the Soviet Union, you had basically the same situation, except that lots of well-educated people were working in a closely restricted industry (publishing). Pretty much every article I ever saw in my first days of working with Soviet scientific journals had been reviewed (sometimes several times), edited, and proofread, and as a result, few howlers made it through the publishing process. As a result, it was relatively easy to translate the stuff, because you didn't have to worry too much about the content: it had been vetted seven ways from Sunday.
Anyway, where I'm going is this: Over the past few decades, everyone and their kid sibling capable of getting their hands on a computer has been busy cranking out all manner of... stuff. These days, I find myself calling Feht ever more frequently to confirm that some sentence or other in a Russian document I'm translating is really as goofy as I think it is. Based on my track record with those calls, I could have saved us both some time, as my suspicions have not been wrong yet, but it's nice to use the goofiness as an excuse to chat.
Which brings us, finally, to the subject of French translation... (and would you believe it? I've largely forgotten what it was I was going to so eloquently say! No matter...)
First, there are those accents: French, you see, is one of those marvelous languages that use accented letters (e.g., é, ê, ë, ì, etc.). I would be more than happy to get with the program and use them properly, but that - it would appear - would place me in the distinct minority of persons who write French (at least, based on the documents I've dealt with so far - ostensibly written in French - in which the text doesn't actually reflect the use of such letters where they are supposed to be used).
This casts all sorts of difficulties, BTW, in the way of anyone who might think of putting together any kind of glossary, unless some really interesting gyrations go into converting queries into regular expressions, e.g., "être voué à l'échec" ("to be destined to fail") becomes "[ê|e]tre vou[é|e] [à|a] l'[é|e]chec."
Then there is Franglais, or worse, simply the liberal sprinkling of English words throughout a text without the slightest effort at francophonization, if that's a word. I suppose I should add "Our bad," when I complain about this kind of thing, as presumably there would be no Franglais without the Anglais, but there it is.
And finally, one must deal with the everyday verbal sloppiness - and I may as well include penmanship here, while I'm at it - one associates with modern technical workers the world over, who typically can only be reliably relied upon to make their mark on their paycheck on alternate pay periods. The rest of what they write gives cause for gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair.
My, it's late. Fortunately, I've only 5 pages left of one document, and less than 9 of another, and the pages are "lightweight" (though they do pack an unusually high density of Whisky-Tango-Foxtrots per square centimeter). Off to bed.
Cheers...
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