You must be extra careful when the text you are translating contains place names.
It is obvious, many geographical names are not the same in French and in English, like London and London, for example. To avoid the many pitfalls, we should systematically carry out checks.
To find more easily on Google, we can add to our search the name of the country concerned in French. For example, if you search for Mount Matterhorn and Switzerland, you actually find Mount Matterhorn.
Also beware of the name. river. It is often translated by the name river and not by river (we would not translate Saint Lawrence River by St. Lawrence River). A river is a major watercourse that flows into the sea; a river is a stream that flows into a river.
We write the hudson river and no the hudson riverand also the fraser river, the yukon river. The Amazon, the Ganges, the Potomac, the Thames (the River Thames) and the Volga are rivers. The Tigris and Euphrates (no s in French, unlike English Euphrates), Also.
As we see, we can omit the credits, when it is a question of a river or a river – when there is no possible confusion. If one writes the polluted Colorado, it is not clear at first glance that it is the river and not the state. The Caniapiscau, the Jacques-Cartier, the Restigouche. The St. Lawrence.
When talking about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we must not forget that the name gulf ends with a ein this sense (we do not write golf). When the word is used alone and written with a capital letter, it usually designates the Persian Gulf. The Gulf War.
But if we use the article there in front of the name of a river, why do we say (correctly) the Richelieu ? This is because this river is one of the exceptions, along with the Saint-Maurice, the Saint-François and the Saguenay. “The masculine gender of these names can be explained by their history, their use or the importance of these rivers in Quebec”, underlines the Quebec Office of the French language.
Use of the word weekend in engfrench
You regularly underline the anglicisms or the layers of English that you recommend to avoid. So I’m surprised to see the word weekend in several articles of The Press. What happened to weekend ?
Replynse
The media don’t see the word weekend – it is written in two words to The Press – as a useless Anglicism to proscribe, but as a useful borrowing from English since it provides a synonym for the term weekend. Sources back them up.
Other sources see things differently. Everyone is therefore free to do as they see fit. But in the media, obviously, both forms, weekend And weekendcoexist.
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