It seems hard to find anyone who's truly bilingual

Leucosticte

Well-known member
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#1
Sometimes, I'd like to get an article translated, but it's about some complex and obscure legal, philosophical, etc. concepts, expressed in English. Here are a couple examples:

The problem is, most native speakers of French don't live in English-speaking countries, or if they do, they're working as a French teacher or as a housewife or something. They're not legal scholars or anything like that, or involved in American politics. They probably don't even follow the goings-on in America that closely.

On the other hand, Americans who are familiar with those topics probably would have trouble doing a translation to French because they wouldn't speak idiomatic French, or know about obscure French terms relating to legal or philosophical topics, even if they have several years of French study under their belts.

So, I think a lot of articles like that simply don't get translated, or don't get translated well. If you look at the French news covering, say, American court cases, the coverage doesn't really deal well with the content; they don't have exact translations for American legal terms like "brief", for example, it seems, or at least, you'd have to look at some sort of legal dictionary or glossary to find the right words. https://www.lexicool.com/online-dictionary.asp?FSP=A09B12&FKW=legal

You need those kinds of terms to write with precision; and precision is pretty important in law, philosophy, etc.
 
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