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in translation: Provenance
Mar. 27th, 2022 03:36 pmi recently reread Patrick Marcel's French translation of Provenance by Ann Leckie. i don't have the time and energy to do an in-depth critique of the Translation like i've done for Défaillances systèmes and Het recht van de Radch (see the translation tag for those), but i want to make a few notes all the same. first and foremost being that Patrick Marcel's translation is excellent, just like his translation of the Imperial Radch trilogy.
gender agreement for nemen and the gender trinary
French has only two grammatical genders while Hwae and Tyr have three social genders. Marcel solves this by creating spellings with æ. now there are proposed neutral gender systems for modern French by Alpheratz (2018) and Florence Ashley (2019) which use æ for certain gendered endings, but Marcel takes it much further, using it in every case. the general rule for neminine ending formation seems to be to take a feminine form and replace the final e with æ. some words (especially kinship terms) require slightly different approaches:
for mixed agreement, Marcel applies the prescriptive rule of using the masculine plural (even for groups without men). singular they is rendered as ils, of which i'm not really a fan.
t/v
Ingray addresses her mother Netano with vous and gets tu in return, which makes sense given the dynamics in the Aughskold household.
Ingray and Taucris use tu for each other.
Ingray and Garal use vous for each other throughout the book, which also feels appropriate.
gender agreement for nemen and the gender trinary
French has only two grammatical genders while Hwae and Tyr have three social genders. Marcel solves this by creating spellings with æ. now there are proposed neutral gender systems for modern French by Alpheratz (2018) and Florence Ashley (2019) which use æ for certain gendered endings, but Marcel takes it much further, using it in every case. the general rule for neminine ending formation seems to be to take a feminine form and replace the final e with æ. some words (especially kinship terms) require slightly different approaches:
- e/em > iæl/læ
- neman > næmme
- nuncle > noncle
- Mx. > Mæ or Mænæmme
for mixed agreement, Marcel applies the prescriptive rule of using the masculine plural (even for groups without men). singular they is rendered as ils, of which i'm not really a fan.
t/v
Ingray addresses her mother Netano with vous and gets tu in return, which makes sense given the dynamics in the Aughskold household.
Ingray and Taucris use tu for each other.
Ingray and Garal use vous for each other throughout the book, which also feels appropriate.
