Talk:Georges Journois

Translation issues

I see a lot of somewhat choppy translation here. I'm afraid I'm too busy to plunge in, but one thing I want to say is that some things are best left in French. For example, even writing in English, one would nearly always refer to the "Croix de guerre", not the "War Cross" or "Cross of War". - Jmabel | Talk 05:59, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

You're right that the translation is very choppy. Thanks for the info about the Croix de Guerre; I'll try to go through and fix it and similar issues. — DroEsperanto (talk) 12:44, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I've made a few fixes myself; some things, though, are so unclear that I hesitate to guess.

• "Journois was too young to be enlisted": does this mean "…too young to be drafted/conscripted" or "too young to enlist"? "To be enlisted" is awkward: enlistment implies something voluntary (at least as to choosing the branch of the military in which one enlists) so the passive voice is inappropriate. - Jmabel | Talk 04:50, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
• "which got him back his War Cross with palm" makes no sense. Surely it was not taken away and returned to him! - Jmabel | Talk 04:58, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I can only apol for the choppy translation. It was on PNT and without any translation would likely have been deleted. I am not an expert in the subject. I certainly had difficulty with the medals; the French original (if I recall correctly) also seemed to miscount how many he had at times, and yes it surprised me about him getting it back, too. I realised there was something wrong there (hence marked cleanup) but despite consulting dictionaries etc could find no bettter way to put it, so left it as best I could; at least a sore thumb gets licked.

The trouble with translating medal names is largely one of deciding whether to translate them at all. It seems, on balance, best to leave them in the original language, perhaps with an approximate translation in parentheses (since, for example, "with palm" makes little sense outside the French military). I've done some other work on military articles with reasonable success (a few bits of cleanup were needed, which is to be expected) but not on people; professional translators tend to go back-and-forth asking questions when unsure, but rarely do those of us watching PNT have that luxury: especially when, for example, the author of quoted text died many hundreds of years ago. All I can say is I hope it is better that we have it at all, and since WP is a mass-participation project but every edit is only made by one person, it cannot be expected for it to be perfect. Hence the cleanup tag.

As you can imagine, translating an article of this density is quite exhausting, and I imagine some of the choppiness comes about simply from not being able to stand back from it while translating. Now I'll put my English head on and try to tidy it up a bit, too.

Thanks and best wishes SimonTrew (talk) 23:10, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I realise now that I went off for my tea and never got back to this article. Presumably it fell off the end of PNT but the first half (or so) was good enough that it survived. I've done my best to put the remainder of the article into reasonable English (though some military phrases still escape me and I've marked with comments in the text.) There is no original text to go by (e.g. in French Wikipedia) so it's largely a case of changing word order etc into more natural English, adding links and conversions, correcting any obvious errors and what probably are errors in the original French (e.g. marchant translated as starting whereas in this military context it really does mean marching; I think "angry" was in the footnote (reference) probably cos the original had a typo enragé instead of engagé (engaged) which would seem to make more sense, for (whoever) to be engaged in Toulouse and not angry there).

Best wishes SimonTrew (talk) 00:55, 8 September 2009 (UTC)