Le butin du Capitaine Verdeterre — 2 of 43

Ryan Veeder

Release 1

Section – Note pour vous qui vous plongez dans cette source

[TC: The pun, "source divers", is hard to translate exactly. The gist of it (relying on both meanings for ‘source’) could translate well to French since "source" also has several meanings in French ("code source" and "water source"). But several reasons make this pun impossible to translate exactly.

First of all, I don't actually know if I've ever heard any French person refer to a source code just as a source; I think people use "source code". Secondly, we don't use "to dive in" ("plonger dans") as a synonym for "reading (avidly)" or "absorbing yourself into", but "to dive yourself in" ("se plonger dans", the reflexive form of the verb); so here we could either say "vous qui plongez dans" (simple, meaning to physically dive in) or "vous qui vous plongez dans" (reflexive, for the figure of speech); but the problem is then that making that choice weakens the pun (the best puns are series of words that you could interpret either way, but here the two interpretations correspond to two different, although close, sequences of words). Lastly, there's a gender problem: we say "un code source" (masculine since "code" is masculine) but "une source" (feminine) for the water source; the gender is going to be reflected in the pronoun, and I don't think there's a construction of this sentence that would allow us to do away with the pronoun; so again, it's going to be clumsy because we must specify a gender, and thus orient the reader.

The right choice here, I believe, is to use the feminine pronoun ("cette"), otherwise people will miss the pun completely, and I used the "se plonger dans" because I felt the sentence was more natural. I think it's balanced, this way it might manage to evoke both.]

[Je vous remercie d'être en train de lire ce code source. Quand j'ai commencé à travailler sur ce jeu, j'ai essayé (pendant un moment) d'ajouter autant de commentaires utiles que je pouvais (le truc c'est que j'ai tendance normalement à ne pas prendre la peine de le faire). J'espérais grâce à ça en faire un texte source qui pourrait peut-être se révéler utile à ceux qui ont envie de le regarder de plus près. Cependant, je vous déconseille d'essayer d'en apprendre trop en lisant ce qui suit. Pour chacun des trucs que j'ai pu bricoler ici, il existe probablement plusieurs solutions qui sont meilleures.

"Je ne suis pas un modèle."

- Charles Barkley]

[TC: I don't think we French speakers use the — to interrupt sentences like English speakers do, it's not as common; I used brackets, you could also use commas, but for some reason they didn't feel the same (brackets interrupt the sentence more than commas). Also, subtle differences you can notice: ", is the thing" would not sound French at all, whereas putting it at the beginning of the sentence feels really French (but maybe more proper and less laid-back than ", is the thing"; the right way to translate "prove to be useful" is "reveal to be useful"; I don't think there's a canonical way to translate "peruse" (which, I think, means "to look really close, slowly, at something" instead of the opposite, but is used as the latter often? If I recall correctly?), so I just used "to look closer at"; reversed the structure of the last sentence because the middle was kinda hard to translate if I wanted to keep it natural (I have to use "for each" instead of "for everything", and the "superior solutions" is a tricky and fragile thing to translate - we can't use "superior" in French, that's weird, so "better", then "mieux", but we don't use it like that, we'd use "meilleur", which actually means "best"... aaah!).]