While French is known as a somewhat insulated language these days in the past it was deeply influenced by surrounding languages, and the language itself influenced many others. For example despite the fact that they come from different language families French still exerted a fairly powerful influence over the development of modern English. This is due to fact that French was introduced to the British Isles in the eleventh century by the invasion of the Normans. While French is a romance language that overall has more in common with Italian and Spanish than with English, the two languages still contain a significant amount of common ground due to this connection. This connection then has quite a positive effect on French-English or English to French translations.
At a base level French and English share a common language of the same twenty six letters. The main difference in the written languages of French and English revolve around the dozen or so specific accent marks unique to the French language. These differences in accents and emphasis carry over into spoken variations of the languages, causing a number of problems due to differences in pronunciation between the two. These different pronunciations cause many of the problems for English and French speakers attempting to understand each other's speech. For example a major point of content for French speakers attempting to learn English revolves around the latter's seemingly chaotic patterns of stressing elements of words, as French incorporates more predictable and normalized patterns of stress and inflection.
Grammatically speaking French and English have a lot in common, and this aspect of the languages usually doesn't present either speaker with many problems. A few persistent areas of difficulty between the two revolve around differences in tense and the framing of questions, often leading to awkward statements of timing and phrasing of questions on both ends. This can normally explain why generic French translations sound a little forced. It is essential that you work with a competent French translation agency to avoid such issues arising.
Finally vocabulary between the two languages benefits from similar roots in the Latin language, making it relatively easy for speakers of either language to pick up large quantities of words in a relatively short time within the other language. While the two languages do feature their share of confusing interpretations of the same root word, overall their similarities in vocabulary outweigh many of their differences, especially in technical and specialized speech.
While French is known as a fairly particular language, overall it is far from impenetrable and far from the most difficult European language to understand or translate to and from.
Charlene Lacandazo is a marketing executive for Rosetta Translation, a leading full-service translation agency in London, UK.
Rosetta Translation specialises in French translation, as well as interpreting services worldwide.
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