Mistranslation
A daughter of James Fenimore Cooper once remarked that the translator who first rendered her father’s novel, “The Spy,” into the French tongue, among other mistakes, made the following: “Readers of the Revolutionary romance will remember that the residence of the Wharton family was called ‘The Locusts.’ The translator referred to his dictionary and found the rendering of the word to be Les Sauterelles, ‘The Grasshoppers.’ But when he found one of the dragoons represented as tying his horse to one of the locusts on the lawn, it would appear as if he might have been at fault. Nothing daunted, however, but taking it for granted that American grasshoppers must be of gigantic dimensions, he gravely informs his readers that the cavalryman secured his charger by fastening the bridle to one of the grasshoppers before the door, apparently standing there for that purpose.
“Much laughter has been raised at a French littérateur who professed to be ‘doctus utriusque linguæ.’ Cibber’s play of ‘Love’s Last Shift’ was translated by a Frenchman who spoke ‘Inglees’ as ‘La Dernière Chemise de l’Amour;’ Congreve’s ‘Mourning Bride,’ by another, as ‘L’Epouse du Matin;’ and a French scholar included among his catalogue of works on natural history essays on ‘Irish Bulls’ by the Edgeworths. Jules Janin, the great critic, in his translation of ‘Macbeth,’ renders ‘Out, out, brief candle!’ as ‘Sortez, chandelle.’ And another, who traduced Shakespeare, commits an equally amusing blunder in rendering Northumberland’s famous speech in ‘Henry IV.’ In the passage
“‘Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone.’
the words italicized are rendered, ‘ainsi douleur! va-t’en!’-‘so grief, be off with you!’ Voltaire did no better with his translations of several of Shakespeare’s plays; in one of which the ‘myriad-minded’ makes a character renounce all claim to a doubtful inheritance, with an avowed resolution to carve for himself a fortune with his sword. Voltaire put it in French, which retranslated, reads, ‘What care I for lands? With my sword I will make a fortune cutting meat.’
“The French translator of one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, knowing nothing of that familiar name for toasted cheese, ‘Welsh rabbit,’ rendered it literally by ‘un lapin du pays de Galles,’ or a rabbit of Wales, and then informed his readers in a foot-note that the lapins or rabbits of Wales have a very superior flavor, and are very tender, which cause them to be in great request in England and Scotland.”