[latexrefman-discuss] Translation to French of "moving argument"

[Johannes Böttcher]

Not a native english speaker here.
You threw 'déplacer' into the bowl of words. Wouldn't that be the 
perfect word? A moving argument can be moved to a different place and 
used there as well (captions for example). Personally, i think déplacer 
might be a good fit in this instance. Having the english original in 
parenthesis as well might be another option to decrease confusion.

Johannes

On 11/15/2016 11:18 AM, Vincent Belaïche wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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