Translation is a powerful tool – when used right.
For beginners, translation will prove useful as they will need a frame of reference, using their native language or another language they learned before (ideally a Romance language like Spanish, Portuguese or Italian).
For intermediate and advanced learners, translating into French becomes more tricky and requires specific techniques that take a deeper understanding of grammar (with the most difficult part being tenses, prepositions and ‘false friends’).
For that reason it is very difficult to venture into translation all by yourself as a beginner.
I have seen a lot of beginner students fall into this pitfall, who find it very hard to recover from the rookie mistakes they’ve done. It’s not their fault, they just didn’t know translation was a difficult exercise – particularly from English to French because of the history those two languages share.
They are so widely different and so very similar at the same time.
The vocabulary part is quite similar, but as you become an intermediate and advanced learner, you’ll have to face more and more those ‘false friends’.
English being a Germanic language, and French being a Romance language, the differences are not only found in the words themselves, but in the whole way things are thought to be and expressed.
See that article for more details about how English is different from French – and for pretty much every other language for that matter 🙂
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
Here are 3 tips to help you guide your translation efforts.
This is a very much underrated part of learning a language – because most people assume translation is a natural process.
Believe me, it is not. 🙂
Let’s use an example.
Two friends sleep in the same room:
– Are you sleeping?
– No, I’m not.
1. Starting with a literal translation
– Are = es
– you = tu
– sleeping = dors? dormir?
– No = non
– I’m = je suis
– not = pas.
From there you’ll be tempted to try: Es-tu dors? Es-tu dormir?
Because you are being dragged by English word order, as well as not being sure how to handle the ‘sleeping’ part: could it just be the same as ‘sleep’ – but then what in the world would ‘are you sleep?’ mean…
2. Remembering the ‘French’ word order
This means French ‘behaves’ differently.
Remember that French natives find it very hard to conceptualize the ways English works.
A French native will typically find the -ing from -sleeping hard to visualize, to imagine.
This is because a native French speaker isn’t ‘wired’ with this -ing concept. It’s something unimaginable to him/her.
The other way around, you’re having the same issue: how to translate the -ing?
Let’s have another example of -ing ending in English:
What are you doing?
Again, you are being tricked by English word order and -ing ways.
3. Memorizing the English meaning of the newly found French word(s)
BONUS
4. Not forgetting the new word(s)