24 The Linguist AUGUST/SEPTEMBER
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When Judith Samuel was asked to translate her own
book about a Victorian sailing ship into French, the old
Québécois nautical terms presented a major challenge
I
n 2011, I received an Arts Council Wales
grant to carry out research into an old
wooden sailing ship whose remains are still
visible in Rhyl Harbour, North Wales. After
two years of intensive research, I eventually
published the results in a book entitled The
'City of Ottawa'.
1
The ship was built in
Quebec, in the Francophone region of
Eastern Canada, where there is a great
interest in maritime history. A local publisher,
Éditions GID, agreed to publish the book, but
alarmingly they asked me to produce a first
manuscript in French, for them to edit into a
polished version. They gave me six months.
It was a daunting prospect. I have the CIOL
Postgraduate Certificate in Translation Studies
but this is in French to English, my native
language. I set out to produce a text that
conveyed the information without ambiguity,
aiming for accuracy rather than style, and
began by running it through Google Translate.
The first considerations were grammatical: the
tense is past historic, but did the 1990 reform
of French orthography apply to Canadian
French? It generally did, and the Grand
dictionnaire terminologique provided further
information on words specific to Quebec.
My book contains specialised maritime
vocabulary. Although I have professional
expertise in historical research, my only
knowledge of sailing was gained by spending
a few days on a modern, full-rigged sailing
ship. I had been careful only to make
statements I could substantiate, but I had
quoted authorities in English without
necessarily understanding every word. When
translating, I had to understand everything.
A great resource was the book on Quebec
historic shipbuilding by Eileen Reid Marcil,
2
the leading authority in the field, which luckily
I had bought in the cheaper French edition.
This provided vocabulary for the technical
aspects of shipbuilding, for instance with
regard to materials ('rock elm' = orme liège)
and construction ('carvel built' = à franc bord,
the superior method where the planks on the
sides of the ship are laid flush with each
other; as opposed to 'clinker built' = bordage
à clins, where they overlap).
Another issue was that of job titles. In the
British system, a lad could start as 'Boy'
Shipshape in French
