Hello, I would like to publish the current manual in French, however I am not completely satisfied with the translation of the phrase `moving argument'.
The classical, well installed, translation to French is `argument mobile'. However, not surprisingly, French `mobile' is the translation of English `mobile', not that of `moving'. The translation of `moving', is rather something like `mouvant', or `branlant'. For instance : +----------+----------+ |English |French | +----------+----------+ |moving |sables | |sands |mouvants | +----------+----------+ |mobile |téléphone | |phone |mobile | +----------+----------+ OK, my feeling is that with `mobile' you just describe some feature/service offered to the user, while `moving' makes it a little more dramatic, ringing a bell that something wrong may happen. In French this nuance is certainly quite stronger than in English because the word `mouvant' belongs more to a litterary vocabulary than to technical vocabulary. The usual way to say `to move' in French is not `se mouvoir', but `se déplacer' or `bouger'. English quite often sounds like old ages French. That is certainly why the geeks that made the original translation to French picked up `mobile', because they were just geeks used to emotionally flat writing of manual pages. So, now I am trying to get your opinion, you native English speakers, I think that keeping `mobile' in French is losing some of the original salty taste of the English wording, and I would like to dare wording it like `argument mouvant'. I know that this wording is sometimes used, and I really feel it closer to what was originally meant although people often think that it is that sort of false-cognate erroneous lazy translation, not a deliberate choice. What is your opinion ? Vincent. --- L'absence de virus dans ce courrier électronique a été vérifiée par le logiciel antivirus Avast. https://www.avast.com/antivirus
