Victorians! discussion

I'm several chapters into The Professor and am wondering - do your editions translate the French? I'm fortunate enough to be fluent in French but not everyone is, and there's a LOT of it...does anyone else have the impression that CB was showing off?

Hey, I don't speak French at all. Never found a version with translation.
Was lost in Villette too.

hey those among us who master French can help when it's needed.
CB lived in Belgium a few years of her life and she was influenced by French but I'm not sure that's enough to include whole passages written in French in an English novel, especially when it's done for the sole purpose of using it!

Back in CB's day there was an assumption that all educated people could at least read French, I think. Perhaps her inclusion of so much French in her text was an assertion of her own status as an educated woman?

Was she then presuming that only the uneducated read her novels?

I meant educated!

Well, Victorian literature does show the "common people" reading but they tend to be there as the exception that proves the rule. So yes, I imagine she was writing for the middle and upper classes.

Rightyo educated ladies, please help

c'est assez pour aujourd'hui demain nous recommenserons te jespere que tout irs bien

it means: it's enough for today. we'll start again tomorrow and I hope everything would be fine.

Thank you
Merci beau coup!

you're welcome :)

I absolutely agree. When I reached chapter 7, I started panicking a bit -- such long French passages, and important to the story! And the Kindle Fire is useless for French-English translations. In fact, I just wrote a strongly-worded email requesting a refund of a useless app. My husband's French is pretty good, and he got me through that chapter, but he's probably going to start getting annoyed with my "challenges/assignments" for him if this amount of French continues. There has to be a better way. I wonder if there's a Norton Critical and if so, if it includes translations.

Erin I have spent ages trying to find a translated version on Amazon. If u have an apple, there's a free translation app u can get.
Takes ages of writing though!

I had the same problem reading War and Peace, and there the french bits were much longer!!! I don't speack a word of french, but being italian when the sentences are short I can grasp the meaning!!!

Lol. Laura, my copy of War and Peace has the French translated, but not the few lines on German. I laughed when I saw that!

I studied a bit of German at University! I was lost with the long french letters!!!!

Lisa wrote: "Erin I have spent ages trying to find a translated version on Amazon. If u have an apple, there's a free translation app u can get.
Takes ages of writing though!"

Unless you download the book from Gutenberg; then you might be able to copy and paste the text into the translator. I was actually able to cut and paste from the HTML version of The Professor in one window into Google Translate in another, and it seemed to work reasonably well, though I only tried with a few phrases.

Here's Google Translate
http://translate.google.com/

and here's the HTML version of The Professor
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1028/1...

Thanks, I've been doing something similar with something from apple.

Everyman wrote: "Unless you download the book from Gutenberg; then you might be able to copy and paste the text into the translator. I was actually able to cut and paste from the HTML version of The Professor in one window into Google Translate in another, and it seemed to work reasonably well, though I only tried with a few phrases."

Thank you! I switched to reading the book on a regular computer -- the Kindle just wasn't working so well. The Chrome browser has a translation add-on that's pretty handy.